
Is running ads on a programming blog worth it? - luu
http://danluu.com/blog-ads
======
IgorPartola
I have a sneaking suspicion that certain groups of people are just much less
susceptible to ads. I never click on ads. I mean, literally never. If you run
an ad monetized site, I am the moocher who never makes you any money. If I
search Google for something, and the result comes up as both an ad and a non-
ad, I click on the non-ad link. If it only comes up as an ad, I keep
searching. With me it's almost irrational, stemming from when long commercial
breaks would interrupt cartoons and movies I watched. Ironically, I am
building a mobile app that's going to be ad monetized (well, at least the free
version will be). I suppose that makes me hypocrite.

At the same time, I think I'm not alone. There's just something dreadful about
having your decision making so directly influenced. It's sort of a "why are
you trying to push this thing on me? Is it not good enough to stand on its own
merit?" I believe that when I need something, I will find it and do my own
research. This is why I also never put much value in Facebook. Who clicks on
those ads? Aren't you just there to socialize?

Edit: I should say that I am aware enough to realize that there are much more
subtle form of marketing that definitely do influence me. If a person I
respect gives something a good review, for example, I will be more likely to
buy it. If a company has a good story to tell about themselves, that makes me
think highly of them. If it's a product I've seen on Shark Tank I'm more
likely to consider it because I'm more familiar with what they do. Ads are
just too obvious about it for me.

~~~
olalonde
It's also easy for me to ignore ads on the web. I am always baffled by those
commenters on HN who claim they would rather pay for content rather than
seeing ads or those that seem to have a deep aversion for ads. For me, ads are
so easy to ignore that those point of views are hard to understand.

~~~
GrinningFool
It's not the ads that bother me [if they're not moving/sounding or actively
drawing my attention]. It's the implicit cross site tracking.

If someone hosts their own ad content, I'm far more likely to click it if it's
relevant (and won't block it, which is my default for anything cross-site).

------
lifeisstillgood
No. There are two main points for a programming blog - to keep your own notes
in one place, and to try and raise your profile / build an audience to make
the next contract or pay review a much happier experience.

Neither of those are helped by ads, and the latter is probably negatively
impacted.

You have really impressive views afaik - which is why someone probably called
you. But even so, you are thinking a rough likely income of 140usd a month.
It's really hard to put the logical business case, but being the guy in the
department who gets 100K views on his blog is easily worth 1700 usd at the
annual pay review (read patio11 post on this subject).

If you are a contractor or can build a network from the blog that 1700 pa is
going to get wiped out in one deal.

Stick a mailchimp form on your blog and keep writing interesting stuff.

~~~
semperfaux
_There are two main points for a programming blog - to keep your own notes in
one place, and to try and raise your profile / build an audience to make the
next contract or pay review a much happier experience._

If one subscribes to your extremely limited view of what a "programming blog"
should be or aspire to be, and what its author(s)' goals are or should be,
then maybe this is reasonable. But I don't find that at all convincing.

 _If you are a contractor or can build a network from the blog that 1700 pa is
going to get wiped out in one deal._

No... it'll still be there. And it'll be there if you have a bad month -- or
year -- and you end up depending more than you'd want on that otherwise paltry
sum.

I'm not saying this is without merit. I'm just saying it's incredibly short-
sighted. I like to look at the big picture as well, but to suggest that money
you might bring in with minimal impact is necessarily useless in the face of
the potential to bring in more money in other (largely or totally unrelated)
ways strikes me as seriously out of touch with the lows reality can drop on
your doorstep.

 _Stick a mailchimp form on your blog and keep writing interesting stuff._

This is at least much more reasonable than making blanket statements that
start with "No."

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Well the No was a direct answer to a direct question. :-)

And I think that putting ads onto an otherwise nice and coherent personal site
sends out all the wrong signals (it makes us judge this not as a personal site
but as a commercial entity - which demands higher production standards (and
oddly lowers the trustworthiness of his opinions on Intel die layouts etc).
The small amount of advertising income is unlikely to ever pay for that trust
loss - and if the OP is ever likely to find that income vital then they should
fight for a pay rise today.

I am negative on the value of broadcast style advertising - I would say that
going for advertising dollars when you don't think they will pay for the young
graduate you really ought to be hiring to do ad sales by phone is a bad idea.
I really cannot see advertising being democratised by giving tiny slices to
smaller and smaller outlets. _Maybe_ affiliation sales will work at those
levels but probably not.

------
sandycheeks
I have tried for two years to monetize my programming blog without making $100
in that entire time while I make a nice living from ads on my other sites.

I save RAW hard drives via a post I wrote 2 years ago. It's not really a
programming post on my programming blog but like forums, you have little
control over the demographic that ends up flocking to your blog. Especially if
it is eclectic like mine.

There are thousands of visitors daily to the post and I get emails and try to
answer comments everyday.

Ads, affiliate links, Amazon, eBay, Adsense, BSA, direct ads, CPA, CPM,
nothing works on my programming blog with thousands of visitors each day.
Extensive a/b testing is inconclusive due to lack of actions.

So now I only have a bitcoin address in that particular post and hope one day
to get something from that :)

Ads do not work for all niches on the internet. Unless, of course, you want to
deceive your users and trick them into clicking on something that is not what
they think it is. That always works, for awhile at least.

In the meantime, I'll keep helping the people who end up there for free as
best I can because in the end, that is in line with what I have hoped the
internet would be.

------
jaxbot
I tried running ads once, made about a penny in a month. Turned off the ads,
cleaned up the site, focused on posting my notes/work, and ended up getting
recruited through some engineers finding my posts when searching for info. To
me, that was way more worth it than any ad revenue, but of course, your
mileage may vary.

------
edent
I use Amazon affiliate links on my blog. If I'm reviewing a book, or piece of
kit, I make the links point at Amazon's UK site with my tracking ID.

If a user clicks on the link, and either buys the product or something else, I
get ~6% of the purchase price.

In a good quarter (100 - 200k views) I can make ~£150. Not "quit my job"
money, but "offsets the hosting, and lets me buy toys" cash.

Downsides are:

\- UK only. There's no (easy) way to send US traffic to the Amazon.com site.
So all my international traffic isn't making me money.

\- Not all my blog posts talk about a product. So I can go months without any
new "money making" content.

\- Can feel a _bit_ scummy. I'm conscious that I'm writing a post not to
impart information, but to entice people to click on links.

\- While AdBlock doesn't seem to interfere with the links, services like
Ghostery _do_.

Overall, I'd say that running a blog is cheap. You probably don't _need_
advertising on it. You're not going to make retirement money unless you're
literally getting millions of hits per day.

~~~
slig
> There's no (easy) way to send US traffic to the Amazon.com site

You can run a small snippet of JS that replaces all the links with
amazon.co.uk to amazon.com. You have to figure out that the user is from the
US (maybe reading the Accept-Language, don't know if that's reliable)

    
    
        // untested
        var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
        for (i=0; i<links.length; i++){
            var link = links[i];
            if (link.href.match(/amazon.co.uk/))
                link.href = link.href.replace('.co.uk', '.com')
        }

~~~
unwiredben
navigator.language will return a string like "en-US", "en-GB", or "fr-FR"
depending on the user's selected locale. That could be used to map different
Amazon URLs, although it looks like you may get a fair number of en-US false
reports. See
[https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#navig...](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#navigatorlanguage).

------
AndrewOMartin
Signing up to an ad exchange is not the only way to run ads.

I think Penny Arcade was a good example, though they're currently not ad
supported. They used to have a small number of banner ads on rotation that
were curated by the authors to be unintrusive and for products they happily
endorsed. I often clicked on these ads as they represented good-reviews by
implication.

It may be simple enough to reserve a rectangle on your site with some text
along the lines of "advertise here, x views a month on average, specialised
crowd, $y per month", then you could sort it out directly with a product
vendor of your choice.

If life's not that simple then someone on here should set up a middleman
business that would be a specialised ad exchange for linking products (small,
and specialised, lowe marketing spend) with blogs (small and specialised,
expert readers, blog owner must approve of the product and ad).

~~~
minimaxir
> _I think Penny Arcade was a good example, though they 're currently not ad
> supported. _

More information behind this: Penny Arcade ran a Kickstarter to remove ads on
their site which was incredibly successful
([https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pennyarcade/penny-
arcad...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pennyarcade/penny-arcade-sells-
out))

This method wouldn't work for normal developers because a) Penny Arcade has a
massive fanbase and b) Penny Arcade makes most of their money off of
merchandise.

Although, would a Patreon for a developer work? It would be a hard sell,
though.

~~~
AndrewOMartin
This is all true, and another interesting alternative to signing up to an ad
exchange.

I specifically used past tense as their current setup is inapplicable to the
blog in the article, though I'd be interested if anyone could reference other
sites that are currently using PA's previous approach.

------
toddynho
Nice post!

I wrote an answer on Quora for "How much do content producers who are apart of
"The Deck" ad network make monthly?" which also gets into some additional
details: [http://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-
are-a...](http://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-apart-of-
The-Deck-ad-network-make-monthly/answer/Todd-Garland)

(disclosure: I'm the Founder of BuySellAds who owns Carbon Ads)

FWIW, when it comes to privacy, BuySellAds (and by extension Carbon Ads) is
probably one of the few companies who don't actually do anything we don't tell
you about with users' browsing data. We use it for forecasting what's
available to be sold - that's it.

We also wrote a handy tutorial that will help folks determine what % of
visitors are using AdBlock:
[http://support.buysellads.com/knowledge_base/topics/how-
to-f...](http://support.buysellads.com/knowledge_base/topics/how-to-figure-
out-what-percentage-of-your-visitors-are-using-an-ad-blocker)

~~~
Encosia
Keep in mind that a lot of ad blockers are blocking third-party analytics too
these days, so measuring an AdBlock ratio by pushing events into GA isn't
going to be very accurate.

I display a gentle plea to whitelist my site ([http://encosia.com/blog/wp-
content/themes/encosia/carbon-ale...](http://encosia.com/blog/wp-
content/themes/encosia/carbon-alert.html)) if the Carbon div isn't in the DOM
after a little bit. I'm displaying that by loading an HTML fragment via AJAX,
so I can grep my server-side logs and see how often that's loaded. I haven't
checked lately, but the ratio was huge the last time I did look.

~~~
username223
Whitelisting you would also allow AddThis, Clicky, GA, G+, and Adobe. The
"gentle plea" just makes your blog (or whatever it is) look annoying and
desperate.

~~~
Encosia
That's not very nice. Surely you wouldn't look a real person you barely know
in the eyes and call them annoying and desperate for something that trivial.

Regardless, I was hesitant to add the nag, but I've only received positive
feedback, e.g.:

[https://twitter.com/TweetsOfSumit/status/534623233920598017](https://twitter.com/TweetsOfSumit/status/534623233920598017)

[https://twitter.com/DanTheOther/status/550807053812252673](https://twitter.com/DanTheOther/status/550807053812252673)

But, thanks for your opinion. It's interesting to hear what people think about
it.

~~~
username223
Surely you'd expect a negative response if you walked up to random people on
the street and said "let me follow you and show you ads!" IRL, I'd smile and
nod politely, while trying to find a way to leave.

~~~
Encosia
Considering we're talking about people choosing to visit my site, your analogy
seems almost exactly backwards. They're walking up to me, not the other way
around.

And, come on. The ad on my site takes up a miniscule fraction of the space
above the fold and probably less than 1% of the total area of content on an
average page on my site. Following people around showing them ads? That's a
heck of an exaggeration.

------
hyperpape
For all the people who mention running adblock, and hate ads on aesthetic
grounds, visit his site from a browser not running adblock. The ads displaying
in the right hand side are relatively unobtrusive and inoffensive.

(Now, if you're concerned about privacy or performance, keep adblock on).

------
mdemare
How about using affiliate links for products that are relevant to your
audience? E.g. books about programming, hardware, etc...

~~~
cobblestone
These are _the worst_. Marco Arment periodically does reviews of various
things (coffee makers, headphones, etc), and he absolutely packs them full of
Amazon affiliate links. I understand that other people have more benign
impressions of this, but to me it is incredibly dubious and puts the whole
venture under a huge question mark -- was the "review" motivated by pitching
affiliate links? Were the items selected based upon their availability on
Amazon? Were the higher commission items favored? And so on. There is simply
zero legitimacy left when you use affiliate links. Similarly, if you "review"
a book and pitch it through affiliate links, I no longer know whether it's
even worth my time (most technical books simply are not), or whether your
impression of it, and encouragement of its purchase, was motivated by
commission links.

Probably the least offputting, brand-ruining tactic is the Daring Fireball
technique of periodically putting some shout out to a sponsor and
encouragement of their product. I suspect it is far more rewarding both to him
and his sponsors, and limits the sliminess to a single occasional post, versus
selling one's credibility.

ITT - people pitching affiliate links and crapware on their tiny blogs talk up
how great it is.

~~~
mootothemax
_These are the worst._

It's worth highlighting this as an example of authoritative-sounding comments
that will put you on the wrong path, if you're not careful.

Techie websites and visitors are a _very_ different market than your average
customer, and within those technical circles, people like this comment writer
will _not_ be representative of the majority of your website's readers.

Whilst I think that the comment author is exaggerating for effect, it's always
worth asking the question in your head:

\- Does this person represent how _one person_ or _the majority_ of my
visitors will think?

~~~
cobblestone
_people like this comment writer will not be representative of the majority of
your website 's readers_

Elsewhere you talked up the benefits of affiliate links, so I find your whole
post somewhat ironic.

Further, it's worth noting that affiliate link blogs almost never make it
anywhere on HN, /r/programming, or elsewhere. They generally exist on the
fringe, existing on the meager search engine traffic, capturing the accidental
visitor. Actual empirical reality seems to counter your claims. The only blog
of _any_ consequence that actually lowers itself to affiliate links is Marco
Arment, and thankfully he confines that to standalone "review" type posts.

------
PaulHoule
I think there was a Coding Horror piece years ago titled something like "We
don't buy software here."

There is a big segment of software developers who literally don't buy
anything. Some of them use free software entirely, others use whatever
software management bought. (For instance, I worked at a place that had a MSDN
subscription so we had all the Microsoft tools we could have possibly wanted)

If you picked a topic truly out of random out of the great encyclopedia of the
situation, you would probably make something around $1-$2 per page view with
Adsense.

If you pick a topic because it is something you like (i.e. "programming",
"blogging", "japanese aninmation", etc.) you join a group of other unfortunate
people that are likely to be getting $0.10-0.20 per page view really because
(i) there is too much of that content, (ii) the people interested in that
content don't spend money.

~~~
wolfgke
> If you pick a topic because it is something you like (i.e. "programming",
> "blogging", "japanese aninmation", etc.) you join a group of other
> unfortunate people that are likely to be getting $0.10-0.20 per page view

$0.10-0.20 per page view is a number that one can only dream of. You probably
rather mean $0.10-0.20 per 1000 page views.

------
filearts
There is an interesting side discussion as to transparency of ad exchanges.

I run a site with significant traffic that is supported by ads served by an ad
exchange. I can track the number of views and the number of clicks and thereby
audit the exchange's numbers.

What I can't do, is ever know if I'm getting a fair share of the underlying ad
revenue since there is no published formula to translate hits/clicks/CPM to
dollars.

What is your experience with this and how have you come to trust or distrust
your ad exchanges?

------
minimaxir
> _For one thing, the 143k hits over a 30-day period seems like a fluke._

For reference, a single post that goes viral on Reddit gets about 100k page
views, while a single post that goes viral on Hacker News gets about 10k
pageviews (both speaking from experience).

It's not worth the hassle of managing ads, at the least. If you're a
developer, your income is probably sufficient enough to not warrant the
supplemental money from ads. :P

------
tomphoolery
"Worse yet, this is getting worse over time. CPM is down something like 5x
since the 90s, and continues to decline. Meanwhile, the percentage of people
using ad blockers continues to increase."

I hope that someday, the trend described above becomes so pronounced that it
means the death of the ad-supported Internet. Perhaps there is a way to make
good money on the web without resorting to such slimy tactics.

~~~
Ripsaw
Like what? Make people pay for content? The internet costs money to maintain
and I'm sorry to say but much of the convenience we enjoy is provided only
because we look at a thousand+ ads a day. Do you really want to pay $5 a month
for every site you want to read?

~~~
jlarocco
Meh.

At one point, I'd have said, "Yes, I would prefer that." And I think in the
long run we'd be better off. People love pointing out how much of the internet
is available because of ads, but they don't point out how much of it is shitty
and difficult to use because of ads. I can do without clicking through 5 pages
of useless blog spam looking for a real article, and stories with seven
paragraphs split up over 14 pages for ad purposes. Those are business models
that deserve to die, IMO.

I think a big chunk of the internet knows that going ad-free would mean they'd
go from making small amounts of money off of ad clicking suckers, to making no
money from anybody.

But, that said, adblocking software is so good lately, I don't mind keeping
the current setup. I'm not paying, and I'm not seeing the ads, so I get the
best of both worlds.

------
logfromblammo
I doubt that the same sort of ads that run elsewhere on the web would work on
a software-related blog.

The blogger would probably have to do paid placement within the text of the
posts, containing clickable links. If the ad does not get blocked, and I even
notice it when I am scanning the text, I'm likely to just hit the back button
and try the next search result.

I'm not intentionally trying to make things more difficult on the people
running the blogs, but I am far more likely to remember a trademark if the
blogger mentions it as a useful tool for a particular task than if an ad for
it serves on a page about something else.

A manufacturer-paid or affiliate-monetized critical review sways me far more
than an attached ad image--even if it was not an entirely positive review.
Besides that, writing a review is content that you control. If you rely on ad-
serving networks, you can't be certain ahead of time what they will be serving
from your page, or what you will be paid.

------
Ripsaw
With the money that a programmer makes in the current market 150 a month is
nothing more then beer money. The blog serves its purpose by acting as an
advertisement for yourself, putting advertisements within an advertisement is
a bit redundant. That one guy that gets turned away from the ads may be the
guy willing to pay you made money.

------
pherocity_
I block ads because advertisers/networks don't respect the do not track flag.
I don't want to block ads, but I value my right to privacy more than I value
your right to monetize my eyeballs. If the ad companies played in good faith,
then I wouldn't have to circumvent them.

------
winry
Hold on, what happened to Coding Horror's traffic?

~~~
cobblestone
People have generally stopped visiting blogs. Even stand-alone web sites are
starting to suffer.

I recently re-enabled my Facebook account for dev purposes, and while there
liked the Verge, AnandTech, etc. So now my feed is a small amount of family
stuff, and a long list of tech news, most of which I quickly scroll past.

It's interesting because I essentially never visit those sites any more. Not
long ago I visited the Verge probably daily, and browsed into random stories.
I visited Anandtech weekly. And so on. Now I see the headlines that I skip
past, and that's that.

And on the pure blog front, a lot of people rely upon sites like HN and reddit
to sift through the chaff, the idea being that those killer blog posts will
rise to the top. We know that isn't actually true (HN is mostly about luck and
pet topics, with a lot of terrible content rising, while Reddit is horribly,
horribly gamed), but the end result is that the good content suffers.

~~~
billyhoffman
Have people "generally stopped visiting blogs?" Do "a lot" of people rely on
HN?

Internet usage is 39% __globally __[1]. I doubt there are any statements you
can make that apply to 2.85 Billion People. Feels like you are ascribing your
personal opinion /beliefs/experiences to "people" in general.

[1] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage)

~~~
engendered
Is this an example of someone adding an irrelevant citation to try to add an
air of authority where they have none?

Technology blogs used to be fairly significant ventures. Now there are
shockingly few that are still maintained, and even those (such as Coding
Horror) detail _dramatic_ declines in readership.

Every reality goes against your garbage post. Yet still you did it. Weird. HN
gets stupider by the day.

[1] - [http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-cook-spaghetti-squash-in-
the...](http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-cook-spaghetti-squash-in-the-oven-
cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-178036)

~~~
megaman22
You kind of have to keep up a regular cadence of new content to get people to
keep coming back. For instance, Coding Horror has had only 9 posts in the last
six months. For the most part, I don't revisit programming/software dev blogs
unless there is new content or there is something relevant that I want to go
review again. Ergo, if you write most of your posts on the latest teacup-
hurricane scandal or the newest version of X software/hardware product, you
aren't going to get the kind of long tail that sustains page views when your
posting rate slows down. On the other hand, if you are producing quality
content that stands the test of time (something like lazyFoo's SDL tutorials
comes to mind), then you are going to move up the search rankings on that
topic, which will reinforce that long tail.

~~~
engendered
For sure, but in a way it's a bit of a chicken and egg issue. Spend lots of
time making content to see the same sputter and occasional luck on the social
news sites.

There was a time a few years ago when you could ask what the best tech blogs
where and there would quickly be thousands of posts. Now...most of those have
been abandoned, and little has appeared in their place. Even among
professional sites it's amazing how many technologies (for instance Intel's
tablet chips) get almost no treatment at all, and astonishingly little actual
effort is expended, so we just end up with some vapid, high-level commentary
that is then blog spammed across autonomously created dupe sites.

It's just a wastelands. People stopped coming and people stopped being
interested.

------
nicholas73
I agree that certain demographics are most likely to click than others. I
myself rarely click on ads, and estimated that click through rates must be
very low (1/1000). Yet, my sudoku game site routinely has CTR of 2-5%. No ad
tricks, just a large and obvious ad. I can only imagine what CTR tricky ads
get.

[http://sudokuisland.com](http://sudokuisland.com)

------
ttty
If you want to be evil do like these guys and freeze who has adblock, but I
sincerely hope you don't do that (not everything is about money!):
[http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2to4pm/what_evil_blo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2to4pm/what_evil_bloggers_do_to_adblock_make_it_hang_by/)

------
nsgi
> What advertisers are interested in an audience that’s mostly programmers
> with an interest in low-level shenanigans?

Employers?

~~~
AndrewOMartin
People who produce goods and services for low-level programming shenanigans.

------
corin_
> _Premium ads can get well over an order of magnitude higher CPM, so the
> picture might not be quite as bleak as I’m making it out to be. But to get
> premium ads you need to appeal to specific advertisers. What advertisers are
> interested in an audience that’s mostly programmers with an interest in low-
> level shenanigans?_

I've no experience marketing anything aimed at this audience, so have no idea
what suitable companies think about this, nor what CPMs or CPAs they'd be used
to seeing in their ad spends.

But as a rule of thumb, targeted means more interesting to advertisers who
want to hit that audience. For example if a VPS company wanted to advertise,
where better than on a popular programmer's blog? (Again I have no idea on
what margins or target CPAs a VPS company would have, so just a random
example.)

Of course, a targeted audience that doesn't interest any advertisers can have
the opposite effect and drive your CPMs down, but more often than not it will
help. It's just a question of will it help enough to justify the time getting
the right advertisers to part with their money to advertise with you.

(I also have no experience either selling or buying adverts for personal
blogs, but the above rule of thumb is pretty scalable.)

edit: Got distracted before finishing reading, and will now add my thoughts to
his last paragraph:

> _There’s the argument that ad blocking is piracy and /or stealing, but I’ve
> never heard a convincing case made. If anything, I think that some of the
> people who make that argument step over the line, as when ars technica
> blocked people who used ad blockers, and then backed off and merely exhorted
> people to disable ad blocking for their site. I think most people would
> agree that directly exhorting people to click on ads and commit click fraud
> is unethical; asking people to disable ad blocking is a difference in
> degree, not in kind. People who use ad blockers are much less likely to
> click on ads, so having them disable ad blockers to generate impressions
> that are unlikely to convert strikes me as pretty similar to having people
> who aren’t interested in the product generate clicks._

I make most of my living from people seeing digital adverts and I'd never
argue its piracy or stealing. So I'm with the author on that one.

As to preventing people from reading your website if they don't disable
adblockers - I think it's a shitty thing to do, it's not something I'd ever be
willing to suggest anyone does, but at the same time I don't see why a website
shouldn't at least be allowed to do it. If a site does it and you don't like
it then stop visiting.

Personally I like sites that show "You're using an adblocker - you can keep
using it if you like, but we'd really appreciate if you didn't". The reason
for this is I disagree with the premise that those who use adblock won't click
adverts. The number one reason for people using adblock is that too many
advertisers/publishers allow shitty adverts. Adverts that pop out of the
window. Or cover up content. Or use too much bandwidth or memory. Etc. If
you're not one of those publishers, and you don't allow those kinds of
advertisers on your site, then there's plenty of people who use adblock but
might consider clicking on one or more of your adverts if they could be
persuaded to view them. I'm not talking about asking them to click adverts,
just that if they see them they might actually _want_ to click on them.

I don't have data to back this up, but have a couple of people I'm going to
talk to and hopefully see if I can get numbers to demonstrate this, as I'm
confident its the case.

Alternatively if anyone reading this has a decent-sized audience (preferably
with a high pageview to unique ratio - i.e. more loyal visitors rather than
just visitors driven by search enginges) and would be interested in testing,
feel free to get in touch to chuck about a couple of ideas. I couldn't really
help on the execution side, but would happy to give advice on how to test if
you'd be willing to share numbers with me afterwards. (The basic idea would be
to see what % of people respond to polite requests to disable adblock, and how
click rates are affected. If you have the technical chops to do more then
could go further and either attempt to anonymously identify which clicks came
from a previous adblock user, and also look at actual conversion rates rather
than just click rates if your advertisers allow you access to this data.)

~~~
PaulHoule
The economics of private ad sales have gotten worse in the last view years,
particularly for the bigger sites.

The big thing in online advertising is "retargeting" which means that a bunch
of systems in NYC built by people who have burned out of HFT will bid for ads
in real time with the consequence that you will look at a pair of shoes on
Zappos and the shoes will follow you around for days.

Retargeting has the benefits that: (i) you're more sure people have some
interest in the product, and (ii) the results are quantifiable. Spend has
moved away from premium venues towards retargeting which is good if you have a
bottom feeding site (they can show a relevant ad even if nothing matches the
content of the page) and bad if you have a premium site.

~~~
corin_
It's definitely helped shift budget from premium targeted sites to bottom
feeding sites, but (at least in my experience) a.) There's still plenty of
money for the premium sites (either because a brand wants to be associated
with a nice site and/or not associated with adverts on shitty sites, or
because it helps build up the cookie pool once people click the ads which then
lets them retarget those users) and b.) CPM rates for those premium sites are
still considerably higher than would be paid across RTB or retargetting
networks.

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mparramon
Another reference: I'm getting about $30/month for 60K pageviews/month to
www.developingandstuff.com – definitely not serious cash, just a nice
incentive.

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freddealmeida
I would suggest you hyper target your site with key advertisers that can
support content. For example, MS for Azure content. They can provide readers
with real value. But requires you figure out how they can make it worth it for
your audience.

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AbhishekBiswal
Then there's AdBlock, of which most of the people reading the blog might be
aware of.

The web looks weird with all the advertisements when I'm not on my own
machine.

~~~
oatmale
Let's be honest here, you didn't read the article.

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Raphmedia
This is very, very interesting. Thanks for the detailed informations! To be,
ad monetization is a big black box. It's very helpful to have "insider"
information.

