December 16th, 2007, 2 Comments »
I’ve always had a simple strategy for advertising on this site: no ads (except occasional ones for personal projects and good causes) on the home page or RSS feed, and plenty of ads on the ‘individual archive’ pages. In theory, regular readers view the front page and RSS feed, and searchers visit a random individual entry on the site. I don’t want to advertise to my dear regular readers (besides, you don’t click ads), but I do want to grab a chunk of the searchers’ attention.
This was an imperfect system. Readers see the individual archive pages when they comment, for example.
I recently happened upon a better solution: the Shylock AdSense plugin for WordPress. This plugin enables you to position ads within blog posts. Nothing too fancy there, I suppose, but the advantage is that you can set an option for ‘don’t display ads on pages less than x days old’.
For example, this entry from today doesn’t have any AdSense ads, but this older one does. No big deal, but an improved implementation of my spare-the-regular-readers-any-ads plan.
2 Comments »
November 29th, 2007, 8 Comments »
One of the reasons I make projects like Get a First Life and Dear Rockers is because they’re experiments in idea viruses. What spreads and what doesn’t? What is the epidemiology of a meme? How visitors behave on the site? And so forth.
In any case, Dear Rockers has gotten a bit of attention–about 12,000 visitors–over the past couple of days. This was one resulting statistics that amused me:
That’s from my Google AdSense account (disregard the ‘187′) for Dear Rockers. It means that despite people viewing 20,107 pages on the site, nobody ever clicked an ad. I’ve only got one little block of ads on the site, in the sidebar under the heading “Pay For Our Rockin’ Server”. Still, you would have thought that at least one of those 12,000 visitors might have clicked it.
Why Hasn’t Anybody Clicked?
Obviously, it’s a tiny set of ads. Also, there’s the reason that Seth Godin often points out that ads are distraction machines. People didn’t come to the site to click the ads.
Most of the traffic came from StumbleUpon, MetaFilter, Mental Floss, Neatorama and other sites frequented by, shall we say, more sophisticated web users. Almost none of it comes from search. Of those veteran netizens, 67% of them use Firefox, and 8% use Safari. They know an ad when they see it, or they block ads and they don’t see them at all.
I’ve seen and read about similar results from the Digg and Slashdot effects (in fact, 12,000 visitors is a typical pay-off for getting to the front page of Digg). Lots of traffic, but no revenue.
The lesson? If you’re trying to make money from online ads–and I’m certainly not with Dear Rockers–don’t cater to the smart, veteran users. Seek up the newbies and the late adopters–they’ll click your ads.
8 Comments »
September 9th, 2007, 15 Comments »
Mark Evans recently articulated an issue that’s been in the back of my mind for a while. What happens to the web if ad-blocking software becomes commonplace?
Anyone using Adblock wants to eat their cake (access free content and services) and have it too (no advertising). Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t gorge yourself at the Web buffet without paying for it in some way such as seeing advertising.
Mark wields some fairly alarmist and provocative language, but he’s generated some interesting discussion in the comments associated with that post.
Hobbyists, Beware
If things online advertising revenue goes south (and we’re talking Patagonia here) as Mark suggests they might, that would be a disaster. I’m wouldn’t be overly worried about web companies who rely on advertising revenue. I’ve talked with plenty of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs who have creative plans to make money that don’t rely on serving ads.
I’d be more concerned about the hobbyists and site owners who have enjoyed (usually small) rewards for their work through Google AdSense and the like. They’ve experienced a significant paradigm shift in recent years, and that’s probably inspired them to keep doing the often excellent work they do online. Here’s a commenter from Mark’s post:
I have provided free content on improvisational theatre [ed: wow, thorough site] for more than a decade, and Google Adwords is the first remuneration I have ever received for this labour of love. It actually helps out with the endlessly thankless task of giving your stuff away ;).
Remove the ad revenue, and you might end up back at GeoCities? Not really, but you get the idea.
Even more problematic than that, however, is the amount of commerce that web advertising enables. Surely there are far more companies using Google AdWords (et al) to generate leads than there are companies depending on advertising for revenue. We’ve had technology companies who get 90% of their leads (and therefore revenue) through their AdWords campaign.
TiVo or Newspaper?
In thinking about this potential problem, we first need to think about how the average person conceives of web advertising. Is it like ads in the newspaper or ads on television? TiVo and the mute button enable people to ignore TV ads, so the ad skipping genie is out of the bottle.
How come readers tolerate ads in newspapers? I don’t think many of them regularly think about how the ads subsidize the price of the paper. By the same token, once they discover the power of ad-blocking software, you’re never going to convince people that they should just turn it off.
If Microsoft ever decides to add (and turn on by default) ad-blocking in Internet Explorer, beware. It will have a huge impact on the economics and, therefore, the landscape of the web.
Bonus links: While looking for an appropriate photo for this post, I encountered two other amusing billboards.
UPDATE: Mark wrote a follow-up article, citing Nick Carr’s post on the same subject.
15 Comments »
