Turning the Ads Off

blogs.wsj.com

12 points·jasonlbaptiste··8 comments

Wikihow is an SEO play. Only frequent vistors would notice/care to turn off ads. That's why it doesn't affect their revenue much.

Matt from Metafilter did this years ago.

Rather, he never turned the big ads on for signed-in users. There was originally just a 60x60 in the sidebar on the front pages that's sold specifically for Metafilter. All the ads he added after that were only for visitors.

Almost all the site's revenue comes from ads on http://ask.metafilter.com -- with a shitload of traffic from google searches. It pays the salaries for 4.25 people!

This article is so vague. The money quote:

“It doesn’t actually hurt revenues that much anyway. And users love it. So why not do it?”

Sure, if you're only making money from per-click advertising like the Adsense used on Wikihow. If, however, you're selling CPM advertising, wave goodbye to X% of your revenue as X% of users turn it off..!

No one sells CPM anymore.

Wrong. CPM is still popular with both high end blogs and strong niche blogs. I sell only CPM. I also believe it's quite common with regular media web sites (newspapers, etc) but I don't have experience with that.

You mean you sell them yourself?

I sell my own advertising, yes. I find I can get a better rate that way. Blogs such as TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb do similarly, I believe.

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