Ask HN: Who wants to do this experiment with me ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who wants to do this experiment with me ?

18 pointsjacquesm6 comments

I've just started a little experiment on a site that I run, I'm allowing the users - any users - to switch off the ads if they want that.

That way the irritation goes to a minimum for those users that do not want ads, and for others they are now in some way 'opting in'.

I'm not trying to 'set a new standard' here just curious about how my experiment will play out.

This site has about 3M pageviews per month and scores terribly in the ECPM, about 12 cents.

What I'm mostly curious about is whether the impressions will go down and the ECPM up or if the impressions will go down and the ECPM will stay the same.

The first one I would call a success, the second a failure.

I'll let this run for a month to see what the effect is.

Is there anybody that wants to do the same thing ?

wikihow did this a while ago (a year or two), you could ask them about their experiences: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Why-Hide-Ads

Nice, thank you for that link.

Their stats would definitely be interesting to know.

This experiment was prompted by this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=940141

Slashdot offers this as an option for high karma users also, which I think makes sense. If your site benefits from a small subset power-users, giving them perks to keep those users around and engaged will make the entire site better.

Do you think you'd have any interest in trying a different ad network that would offer higher CPMs? I am actually pitching an idea at Atlanta Startup Weekend tonight and you'd be a perfect first customer :)

LMK so I can announce a first customer in my pitch (which is in a few minutes!!!)

Next time you want to reach me 'right now' best call, I'm probably not in the same timezone as you are. But sure, if it would help you sign me up! I only do fairly low key advertising though.

Both my email and my cell number are in my sig.

In the interest of not influencing the experiment with a bunch of traffic from HN I'm not posting the site here.

Yeah after I posted I looked at your profile and realized you were probably sleeping :)

I'll touch base out-of-band.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com