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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Mobile app ads keep paying more and more. I'm regularly getting $1 per click, and sometimes as high as $5 (finance category). I can't remember ever getting this much for websites. I'm using google admob

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As a web publisher, I earn on average $0.42 per click (mostly from http://www.daterangepicker.com).

As a web advertiser, I pay on average $1.76 per click (for SaaS stuff with a high CLTV).

$1-5 per click for app ads makes sense if the apps have a high CLTV, or the campaigns are temporary as they often are -- they just need to get enough installs to start ranking in app store categories, after which that becomes a free customer acquisition channel, or so I've heard.

Wow, that's a huge gap between spending and earning. Do ad networks have costs other than employees and hosting or did just nobody undercut that price yet?

Edit: What is CLTV? I tried looking it up but not sure what I found makes sense.

In addition to the direct costs of operating ad networks, it's likely/possible that the poster is targeting different people with his ads than are the advertisers whose ads run on his site.

CLTV: Customer Lifetime Value. Roughly, how much revenue can you expect to earn from a customer over the entire time they interact with your business.

May I ask what percentage of your visitors clicks on ads? $5 per click isn't really worth much if no one clicks the ad, or is that constant throughout topics?

Are you U.S. based? We're entering election season and the increased demand on advertising channels can have a network affect across all categories.

I was talking to a friend who is at an agency doing radio ads for a large retail company, and basically the company's usual budget will be blown out almost immediately on radio, so they're spending it on other channels.

I cant say I have ever intentionally clicked on a mobile ad. That little 'x' is too tiny for my chubby fingers.

Twitter's ads are like this. I hit the x, it opens the ad. I back out and hit the x again, it closes the ad. This behavior is consistent enough that I'm almost convinced it's intentional.

What? That's seems absurdly high..

It's pretty steep compared to the last decade. For a while during the dotcom bubble GoTo.com used to list how much a text ad click cost when it was clicked. I remember Dell running ads on there that were paying $5+ per click at the time, and that wasn't uncommon. I really haven't seen anything quite that crazy since those days, when it comes to general / broad-based CPC advertising.

It's not.

"Insurance", "loans", "mortgage" are all $44+ per click.

Some very specialized one like "mesothelioma suit" are $800+. Even misspellings like "mesotheliama" are $600+.

I try to remember searching on that term and clicking the ads from time to time, for no other reason than to line Google's pockets. It seems like the quickest way for me to pay them back for the various free (and ad free) services that I use from them.

Probably there is something terribly wrong with this, but I'm not entirely convinced. I am a human typing a search, and physically clicking a link in the results. I just don't have or happen to know anyone who has mesothelioma.

https://www.adgooroo.com/resources/blog/the-most-expensive-k...

https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/05/31/the-most-expensive-...

mesothelioma cases must be quite lucrative for them to spend this kind of money.

This is the one of the saddest data table I've seen in awhile.

If (CPC * ConvRate * CLV) > CPC then you can pay those prices. Granted, it's not entirely that simple with payback periods to consider, but big advertisers like insurance companies have plenty of money to fund acquisition until it pays back.

I wonder if the fact that Google bans ad-blocking from its store and pre-loads Chrome on Android, which doesn't allow ad-blocking extensions either, has anything to do with that.

Somehow, between its 5 other anti-trust charges against Google, the EU seems to have missed one of Google's biggest abuses of its monopoly-level position in the mobile market.

Bears asking what market your website is in, perhaps? Since some keywords are more competitive than others, and if they're related to your site topic, presumably there's strong targeting there.

Its mobile apps, not websites. Banners and interstitials in finance mobile apps.

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