

Ad Revenue Per Visit - What Your Eyes Cost - warkaiser
http://www.alexwilhelm.com/alex_wilhelm/2009/01/ad-revenue-per-visit-what-your-eyes-cost.html
A breakdown of what it costs advertisers to have you visit a major blog.
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patio11
Capsule summary: if you know what CPM means (cost per thousand impressions)
you can derive cost per visit. Take one guess how. Yep, you were right.

The interesting bit: _I get 50 cents per thousand impressions, which could be
worse. That means that I am getting 1/160th of what they are. Is my content
really so much worse?_

This is a fundamental misconception. Nobody cares what your content quality
is. They care about the quality of the traffic that you send to them. I spend
hundreds of dollars a month paying effective CPMs of $10+ on some sites which
are, ahem, total garbage. Because _they send me people that convert_. (How?
They rank highly for search terms that ideally I would rank highly for, but
their content is such crap that people are like "Oh noes, I need to actually
get this done, oh wait here is an ad which promises pain relief CLICK oh thank
God a website which knows what it is doing.")

I don't care if you are John Paul II, Mark Twain, and JRR Tolkien all rolled
into one, and if every blog post you write creates a new genre of literature:
if the people who read your blog are anti-commercial poor teenagers who have
no desire to buy the content from ads you put on there, then your CPM will be
crappy.

(Incidentally, if you hide your ads in the corner under a label saying "I sold
out" and you are writing to an ad-blind niche, I would not expect $20 CPMs.
Hope that helps.)

