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Comment by declan | Hacker News Reader

Here are some stats on advertising cost per thousand views (CPMs) from mid-2014, which may be relevant: http://monetizepros.com/blog/2014/average-cpm-rates/

Some excerpts:

Average CPM for business & finance: $6.15

Average CPM for technology: $4.56

Average CPM for style and beauty: $1.48

So at $4.56 per thousand views, assuming one ad per page, even if an article does 20K views, that's only $91. This is why news organizations look for differentiators; it's what we did when I was at Wired and CNET, though I was on the editorial side, not advertising. Unfortunately not all news organizations succeed; Gigaom did events and had a paid research arm, but that wasn't enough. I'm also still mourning Dr. Dobb's, which I first read as a teenager. :(

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I am managing a 7 digit banner ad budget which helps my client generate a profitable 8 digit income in education business. So no display advertising isn't dead for advertisers, because possibilities are more. The problem with Gigaom and DDJ is that they have low capacity with not much relevance advantage. One single programmer can run a web site with tenfold their capacity with a fraction of their cost.

In contrast one can claim banner (outdoor, indoor or web) never really worked except for some carefully chosen "success stories", and now advertisers can measure.

What does "low capacity with not much relevance advantage" mean? My understanding is that DDJ (at least) has great content that "one single programmer" couldn't hope to match.

Low capacity means they lack the man power to do fancy custom campaigns( think Vox Media level customization http://www.voxmedia.com/vox-advertising )

Relevance advantage means that a site is so big and important in a broad category that it's worth it for advertisers to pay a premium to get frequent views from its readers( think of how TechCrunch is so central to the tech community)

> Low capacity means they lack the man power to do fancy custom campaigns

That's confusing to me, because the grandparent said:

> One single programmer can run a web site with tenfold their capacity

How could one programmer run a website with more manpower than Gigaom or DDJ?

You've hit on a key point: the ability to measure ROI with digital media has drastically changed the advertising landscape. Magazine advertising has always had notoriously low impact, as an example.

Considering that prior to the web, the most trackable advertising was direct mail.

CPM rates for enterprise technology sites are significantly higher.

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