Is running ads on a programming blog worth it?
danluu.com
danluu.com
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.
Slightly off-topic, but I do something a little different as my own "screw you" to stupid advertisers.
If I see an advert in my search results that I'll find useful, I don't mind clicking it. For example if I search "London cinema" and a certain cinema has paid to be up there that I'm actually interested in, why not click it. If they were already in the organic results above the fold, I'll click organic to save them their ad budget.
However if I see an advert that's targeting their own brand name that I just searched (for example if I searched "Y Combinator" and saw YC had both top organic spot and a paid ad above) then I'll specifically click on the paid spot to cost them money. Just because you'd be amazed how many people in how many ad agencies make themselves look good to clients by using their own brands to push up results. Yes, if you have a paid advert for when people are already looking specifically for you of course you'll bump up your overall performance for search budgets.
(There is an argument - which may be correct at times - for needing to bid on your own brand / product names so as to outbid competitors aiming for them, but I've never yet been shown any data to actually justify the cost.)
A couple of writeups can be found at:
http://www.eanalytica.com/blog/unforseen-risks-when-stopping...
http://www.eanalytica.com/blog/Richard-Fergie-at-Biddable-Wo...
At this ROI the money could be better spent in other channels. But as you can read in the post there were unforeseen consequences which I can go into more detail on this if you email me.
I've also seen it where £1 spent on brand generated £18 in incremental revenue so in this case it was worth keeping on.
When you pay directly you cut out a layer of middlemen (the ad company / broker) so I see subscription-based sites as more efficient than ad-supported ones.
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).
[1] http://www.mediamarkt.de/ (sells electronics)
I have a sneaky suspicion that the same is true for these popups you see all over the internet. I have a basic rule: If there is a popup, I just close the tab. I don't care how good the content is. It can't be that good if the webmaster needs to catch my attention like a needy girlfriend by flashing stuff in my eyes. Close and gone.
I wonder if I'm in such a minority such that it doesn't matter, or if this is intentional segmentation or just plain stupidity on the side of webmasters.
However, how can a blogging programmer make some money off its blog then? Donations or micro-donations (think Flattr/Gratipay/etc) is the only idea I can think of.
But if you have a trustworthy relationship to your readers, it's usually appreciated if they get tips on books or software that helps them. If you get a few bucks for a recommendation, everybody wins.
Also, you could start your own product (e. g. an ebook or a tutorial about something), although this requires clearly more effort.
The advantage of affiliate is that you get to select the products you recommend, unlike with most ads.
Same to hardware reviewers, product reviewers, etcetera, etcetera.
Consumers themselves paying, I don't see it that often, but there's the "donations" model that seems to be popular among streamers, etc., I haven't donated myself but I could see myself doing so.
But in general there's too many mediocre and crappy blogs to say I'd pay money for them. Seriously, why would I pay money to read the millionth article about some random guy just discovering Haskell?
IMO, maintaining a blog is like having a Facebook account.
Especially a demographic that is more likely to use ad blocking browser plugins.
I don't think it's just that. It's a demographic that is largely responsible for running ads on various platforms (websites, apps, etc). This same demographic will inherently understand ads, how they work, how they are usually not what you are looking for, what types of manipulations are involved, etc.
I never click on any ads either, although I don't employ any ad-block programs (so I suppose if a site is getting paid for impressions rather than clicks, then they are monetizing in some small way off my traffic).
It's not that I despise ads, like some folks are mentioning. I've just come to tune them out; I don't even really notice them on sites I visit anymore.
At the office, however, a large part of my dayjob is invested in learning how to best position ad content, and re-target users to entice them into making purchases.
Ads are a necessity. A significant portion of the online-population does not employ the same product search capabilities as the folks here on HN -- and because of this we've found ads are a major driver of traffic to ecommerce websites... I don't see them going away any time soon.
"The Third-person effect [1] hypothesis or Third-person perception or Web Third-person effect [2] predicts that people tend to perceive that mass communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves, based on personal biases; additionally, because of this perception, people tend to take action to counteract the messages’ influence. The Third-person effect hypothesis often manifests itself through an individual’s overestimation of the effect of a mass communicated message on the generalized other, or an underestimation of the effect of a mass communicated message on themselves."
So, basically, people spend money anyway, but you just "reward" the site when you click on it.
Overall marketed links seem less trustworthy than something high ranking by its own merit.
I'm not the decision maker at work. I can't influence a decision on the purchase of a $XX,XXX software package. The ads for things I've already bought are particularly sad, because it's too late. I'm not buying another bunk bed, but after I bought a bunk bed (with no help from advertising engines) I spent the next month ignoring ads for bunk beds.
Someone is not getting their money's worth on these ads.
On the other hand, I rarely if ever click on site and blog ads (that make it through Noscript). Guess that is why Google has the most ad revenue on the internet (even though facebook arguably has more user data and people spend more time on it on average).
Personally, I think if someone does something for me, I'd rather pay them directly and become a customer. But until then, I am well aware that the real clients are advertisers, not me.
I wish I got some advertisements from these companies so I knew what offers existed at all, instead of more advertisements for things I know exist and I don't want or need (about any consumer product at all).
I don't know your profession (Ok now I do - vulcanology - cool!) but if you need this equipment and need to search hard for it, others are too.
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.
I suppose even Jeff Atwood's blog ultimately had the most impact when he used it to drive the initial traffic to StackOverflow.
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."
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.
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.
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.
If you're using an ordinary link, it shouldn't; are you using some kind of magic JavaScript from Amazon or an affiliate handling service there?
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')
}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).
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...)
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.
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.
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...
(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...
I display a gentle plea to whitelist my site (http://encosia.com/blog/wp-content/themes/encosia/carbon-ale...) 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.
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/DanTheOther/status/550807053812252673
But, thanks for your opinion. It's interesting to hear what people think about it.
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.
(Now, if you're concerned about privacy or performance, keep adblock on).
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.
If the income is so low and irrelevant, why are the links there in the first place. Why even put a question mark on it when it's just entirely unnecessary? I fairly prolifically blog, and I haven't put a single affiliate link in a post since it was a novelty in the mid-90s, because to do so takes advantage of readers and undermines credibility.
And to your root claim, I'd say it's absolutely ridiculous. I've come across blogs reviewing and recommending books that they clearly had never read, at most skimming a short ways in. Most technical books are absolutely horrendous (I understand you cite yourself as an author, almost surely motivating your down arrow), so this completely short circuits the equation.
I agree that most technical books are pretty bad. That's why I've only made blog posts recommending 2-3 out of the dozens that publishers have sent me to review.
In fact, if you look a few years back on my blog, Intel gave me a nice Ultrabook to review and I ultimately posted saying that I could not recommend it due to the keyboard. If I'll bite the hand that feeds me $1,500 laptops, I'm pretty confident that a few Amazon dollars here and there are not clouding my judgement.
(BTW, I wasn't the one who downvoted you; I couldn't even if I wanted to since your comment is a reply to mine)
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?
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.
Affiliate links are the only kind of ads that I click on, there's no real downside if I am buying the item for the same price, affiliate or not, and the writer gets some cash too. Surely that's win-win?
DF (and other people)'s shout-outs are worse IMO. They are always so shiny and positive, there's rarely any sign of neutality. At least they can be skipped fairly easily.
There is no illusion or pretending at neutrality: Those shout-outs are unabashed commercials, similar to the sitcom taking a break for commercials. Gruber seems to never mention the product outside of those shout outs. The alternative is someone talking about a great new book they read [BUY NOW] while drinking coffee from their french press [BUY NOW] and how oh their life is different now that they sleep on that new smart mattress [BUY NOW], and the new sous vide cooker is the bee's knees [BUY NOW]...
If the author is making clear he or she will get a commission on sales through the link, I don't think "dubious" is a fair description.
Might actually be interesting to have a review site with both positive and negative reviews, but only include affiliate links with the positive ones. The links would signify an explicit endorsement of the product. Would make it clear the reviewers don't endorse everything out there, and somewhat tie their reputation to the quality of what they endorse.
Personally, I don't have a problem with people making money from content they create, as long as their transparent about how they're making it.
These can work surprisingly well.
As long as your content isn't a glorified advert, often your audience will be thankful for pointing out e.g. a book or website theme they weren't previously aware of even existing.
I usually link once and do a text link rather than the Amazon graphic ad box. If it is something that interests me, I don't have a problem with it.
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.
$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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Employers?
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.)
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.
The web looks weird with all the advertisements when I'm not on my own machine.