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Pastimes : The Death of Silicon Investor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: d:oug who wrote (622)	4/20/2002 11:36:11 AM
From: (Bob) Zumbrunnen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1003

Something like that would boost revenue pretty dramatically, as most ad campaigns these days pay per click rather than per 1k impressions. But, the ad agencies forbid it, and really it smacks too much of "cheating" for me to like it. Not only from the "this is wrong" viewpoint, but also because I'm a statistics junkie and don't want to pollute or artificially influence my precious stats. <g> I've considered popup and popunder ads, but have held back because I personally despise them. On the other hand, the main function of ads to me is to be an annoyance. But too many ads and you've got RB. And I think we know how snappy that site performs. Your free version's revenue of "penny per thousand ad-viewing hits." is really lower by a factor of 100 to what i would have guessed Was lower than my expectations, too, but the climate is awful. Bump it up by that factor of 100, and you've got flat $1.00 CPM. Which I think is fair, and also think we're heading back toward. Some CPM campaigns do pay rates of $1 and higher (unlike the $40 some companies got during the bubble), but CPM campaigns are relatively rare right now. I'd be one happy camper if all my ads were $1 CPM. Would actually be able to pay myself a salary. FastClick currently has a CPM campaign available that pays $1.95 gross ($1.27 net), but I've been served up exactly 79 impressions on it in the few days it's been there, out of hundreds of thousands of ad inventory. There are a lot of sites vying for the CPM campaigns. The quality of ads is deplorable, too. I get very low CTR's on the CPC campaigns because they're mostly junk. The companies willing to pay CPM tend to run better ads and be selling things more people are interested in, and my CTR's on those are actually well above the high-end of what's considered a "normal" range. If I were getting more CPM's, it'd work out a lot better both for me and the advertisers. All of my ads come from FastClick, ValueClick, and FocusIN, in that order. FastClick has an awesome campaign management and reporting system, so everything goes through them. I'm looking at my stats on that page now, and it's really kinda depressing. They have so little inventory that typically more than 98% of the ad requests going to them get redirected to my secondaries (VC and FIN). And when the secondaries don't have enough inventory, they serve up their house ads. At least in FIN's case, I was able to figure out a way to redirect those ads ("defaults", in the parlance) back to FastClick with a code that makes them deliver up a free public service ad from the Ad Council. I think the best route would be to do away with the agencies and go directly to the advertisers and look primarily for CPM from advertisers selling something that people on the site might actually want. But that would be a fulltime job requiring tons of legwork to sell a pretty substantial amount of inventory. And if I can't afford to pay me yet, I sure can't afford to pay an ad rep yet. Although I've considered looking for one who's self-confident and experienced enough to work on commission. I really like your idea of letting people "earn" a preview of the premium interface, though. I wouldn't tie it to ad clicks (see "wrong", above), but could tie it to visits. I don't track page views per user yet, but could easily enough since I do track everyone's last activity so I can see who's currently on the site. Easy enough to tally up the page views since the system's already doing 90% of that work. Or maybe tie it to the number of posts, since that's already tracked. Say, for every 100 posts, you get to use the site in Premium mode for a day. Actually, I had no idea so little of a garage's revenue came from gas sales. Guess that's why you don't see many places that are only gas stations. They're either garages with pumps or convenience stores with pumps.