I think this is pretty neat! I would definitely consider chucking a few dollars into something like this. Especially since it has a nice, niche target audience.
My concerns:
- These are pretty spendy for CPM ads, and we almost never do CPM because of low historic RoI.
- We're not going to spend any money on any advertising unless we can approximate how much business it brings us. For digital, that means we need something like UTM. And if we are using UTM, we are basically getting the exact same information Google would be giving us. And we would still get complaints from developers. So not sure what tangible difference it would bring us.
- Developers (technical people) are a pretty lousy group to advertise to. They make the cheapest, whiniest customers (sorry!). But if I had a niche product, this could certainly be very appealing.
Thanks for the kind words (and being real with some of the unkind words :D).
To answer your questions:
* CPM ads work well for us, because we make a set amount, and places the burden of having good targeting & ads on the buyer. With CPC, a crappy ad just gets lots of views without paying us anything for them, which is a bad incentive. Lots of companies have found success with our ads, so they must have good ROI for them, but it does require a somewhat high LTV and good ads that people click.
I think that's a fair enough point. And it's not like Google's display advertisement network is a stellar option to begin with, so this could certainly be worth the money in comparison there.
BUT.... the lion's share of our digital advertising budget goes to CPC - it's just easier to shell out 8k a month ahead of time when we roughly know what it will get us. In the interest of not leaving money on the table, I am sure you guys will eventually pursue CPC options as you scale up.
Adding to the third point developers are technical people and many have adblockers set up in their browsers (at least that's what I see in industry). I wonder if many developers will even notice the ads provided by this service.
I think this is pretty neat! I would definitely consider chucking a few dollars into something like this. Especially since it has a nice, niche target audience.
My concerns:
- These are pretty spendy for CPM ads, and we almost never do CPM because of low historic RoI.
- We're not going to spend any money on any advertising unless we can approximate how much business it brings us. For digital, that means we need something like UTM. And if we are using UTM, we are basically getting the exact same information Google would be giving us. And we would still get complaints from developers. So not sure what tangible difference it would bring us.
- Developers (technical people) are a pretty lousy group to advertise to. They make the cheapest, whiniest customers (sorry!). But if I had a niche product, this could certainly be very appealing.