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 »
October 10th, 2007, 12 Comments »
Discussing a blog post on the Guardian’s site, Robert writes about referral traffic–the number of visitors he receives when he’s referenced on other sites:
Every time I get on TechMeme I get 500 to 3,000 visits. That matches what the Guardian and what Nick Carr are seeing.
But, truth is not many sites out there do any better. Yeah, when I get on Digg I get 20,000. When I got on the front page of the BBC a couple times in the past month I got 5,000 each time. But Valleywag? I get 100 to 1,000 visits…
Dave Winer? A few thousand per link, but sometimes only a few hundred. Wired? A few thousand. Stumbleupon? I got tens of thousands once, but not lately. Twitter? A few hundred, even when dozens of people put my link up.
Those numbers sound about right to me. Robert’s cult of personality probably amplifies things a bit–I’ve never seen more than 15,000 visitors from a single Digg post on this or any of my clients’ sites.
My best example of disappointing referral numbers is the recent link to this site in the New York Times. The New York Times! The Grey Lady! They get 450,000 visitors a day. Surely that would result in a windfall of referral traffic, right?
Not so much:
The Times was the #8 referrer to this site for July, 2007. I mean, I love each and every one of you 760 Times readers, but you didn’t bring enough friends.
Now obviously, context matters. The Times link was just in the sidebar of an article, among sundry other links. Plus it helps if there’s something really enticing at the other of the link.
Which brings me to a related truth: offline media hits rarely result in radically increased online visitors. We emphasize this to our clients over and over. There’s plenty of value in doing traditional, offline media relations, but in my experience, an immediate influx of visitors isn’t one of them.
12 Comments »
