Reply With QuoteRemind me which one made their girlfriend drop out of college.
For those into the actual business of what makes games sites sustainable, there's a pretty interesting discussion going on right now on Blue's News, after Blue posted about more intrusive ads appearing because the site "has been losing money for over two years now":
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/boa...threadid=43677
Particularly intriguing are recent comments from Blue, replying to someone talking about the type of ads Blue's News has up:
"the two sites you specifically mention [including Shacknews] are bad comparisons, as they each rely on other dealings for survival, including direct marketing their own and others' services to gamers."
..followed by Steve Gibson from Shacknews:
"Shacknews can be sustained entirely on advertising and had been for quite a while including post-dotcom-bubble. It is possible, even right now. I know this as a certainty since I personally handled each advertising deal on Shacknews. Recently we have added FileShack to the mix which has been significant, but prior to that it was all advertising."
So, what's going on here? Can Blue not get to break-even point because his middle-man advertising wranglers (UGO?) are taking a lot of money off the top? Is there a major difference in hits? Are Hudson the Wonder Dog's contract demands excessive? Interesting, at any rate.
Remind me which one made their girlfriend drop out of college.
Steve always seemed to go well with the business side, he seems to have been more mobile with hooking up with companies, and leaving them in due time (3dfx, Ritual).
I guess it's like Blue writes in response:
"I have always been envious of his business savvy... going back to the days of the Quake Rag and the Quakeholio.."
I am amazed, I must admit, at their dedication to a job that must be really monotonous a lot of times.
Yeah, I think Gibson is pretty savvy about running his business, at least since his near meltdown over not paying his taxes and asking his readers to bail him out.
You'd also have to compare the traffic of the two sites to get a better feel for which one is more likely to generate better ad revenue. Maybe Shacknews has significantly more traffic. Their message boards are much more active.
Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that whole thing.Originally Posted by Mark Asher
Apart from that though, seemingly good instincts about it. Seeing how he's independent and came out of the IT meltdown on his feet.
For as much as I ragged on Steve at the time, he really made all the right moves afterwards. He seems to have a good sense on when to bail, something Blue obviously does not as he still shows UGO ads. Ads are down, but with both google adsense and some other networks, you can make some money - a 1/6 the cpm, but still there.
I think blue is misleading saying he is losing money. That means hosting + other expenses > income, since until sometime last year, UGO gave him free hosting, I don't see him as losing money.
The only new thing - no one wants forum traffic, that part has gone to hell and blue, by blocking his archive access to google and casual users, really loses out on a lot of traffic he could get for free to a part of his site that pays.
Chet
I'm curious, Chet, what you mean by "no one wants forum traffic." I thought the whole goal was to "build community" and crap like that.
Care to elaborate?
For CPM banners, no one wants forum traffic. It is just a bunch of page shows where everyone's head is down and looking at the posts. Your click ration on a forum is normally a 1/10 (if you are lucky for it to be that high) on a forum.
Advertisers could care less about communities. They want a high return on per banner show or per click, and forums don't deliver that.
Chet
Advertisers still care about click-through rates? Good to see they haven't caught on yet.
I think the "communnity" on Shacknews is what kept it afloat. It's hard to convince advertisers that anything but click-throughs gets seen. However, it seems like he had shown them that his community was large and consisted of the people they wanted to reach. Also, a lot of those people are now paying for his file service.
Do the same ads run on the front page of shacknews as they do in the forums? That is such a terrible placement to begin with.
CPC is just one thing they care about, and why shouldn't they? If they show an ad 10,000 times and no one clicks, is the ad doing well?
More telling is the ePC, earnings per click. But even that metric needs to start out with first the click.
More and more advertising is turning to CPA, cost per action. Look at edailydeal and our recent bush doll ad. Dismal failure - but I think it has to do with a shitty merchant. 3,899 clicks - zero sales. Great for KBtoys, horrid for me. Every other dumb feature on edailydeal sells a few at least, this is the first major strikeout, which is why i blame the merchant.
Chet
Well, this is a five-year old argument at this point, but I'm not sure why companies expect internet ads to translate into sales for anything but the most trivial of impulse buys.
Every ad supported site should take note of Penny Arcade, which hand-picks its advertisements and has a strict no-flash, no-sounds, no-popups, no-animation policy. And the best part is, that the last I heard, their ad revenues are quite good.
I think the most important aspect is hand picking the advertisements. Sure its more work, but at least 95% of web advertisement that I see are totally irrelevant to me as a non-US citizen (and they are probably ignored by at least 90% of US readers too). The worst offenders are the "Green Card Lottery" and "You have a message waiting" etc. that are outright bullshit, but I don't think Blue's carries there (I have no idea what the ads there are like nowadays, since my browser blocks all shockwave flash banners).
Penny Arcade on the other hand only has ads that are relevant to gamers and they are often genuinily good deals. It also helps that they have a loyal fan community that clicks even the less interesting banners out of support.
As an evil user of Mozilla Firebird (with popup blocking, blocking ads by server, etc....) and Outpost Firewall (with ad blocking by server or graphic size) I just wanted to ask: "What intrusive ads?"
I used to filter everything, but nowadays I just filter flash and popups, since I think most sites deserve the trickle of income ads generate. I make an exception with flash and popups since they are just evil incarnate and every site embracing them deserves the loss of ad views caused by filtering.
shang, penny arcade is in a unique position which almost every other site would kill for. They are a terrible example of normal advertising on the net, because most sites simply never get that choice to pick between well paying ads.
Chet
The reason advertisers expect action on Internet ads is because that's how sales people are selling ads to them, still.
"With the Internet you no longer have to wonder if your ad is successful - just look at your revenue!"
It sounded good in 1999, but these days it'd be smarter to look at the ads like bilboards. How does Nike value all their bilboards and taxi-cab ads? There's no click-through and I bet it's impossible to measure the marginal improvement in sales after a new bilboard runs.
It's all about impressions.
Chet,
You can definitely blame the merchant, since they're not shipping the damn things for about 2 months.
asjunk
How did they get to that position? I interned at an advertising firm but I still find the net mystifying - on both sides. On the one hand I don't get why advertisers expect click-through and pop-ups to be viable. I was taught "get your ad and logo in front of people enough times and they'll remember it when you want them to." I don't see why the net is different from magazines, the paper, and TV in this regard. I ignore web ads as easily as I ignore magazine ads. On the other I don't understand why web-makers do little to nothing to establish themselves as a product. Or in a focussed manner and then they expect advertisers to jump on board. Can Blue really give demographic information?
Seems to me that Penny Arcade has done something Blues, Shack, etc., have not. They've created a site marketers and advertisers understand. They make a product. A cartoon. And it appears three times a week. They can probably offer demographic information, and that helps. What kind of demo is a Link News Site? What is a Link News Site? What does it make? Most advertisers probably figure: "Why put an ad on this site? Everybody comes here so they can leave again!" I think advertisers don't understand them and what they do.
GamerDad is tiny (8 weeks old). We're doing well but finding parents isn't easy and getting them to come back automatically is even harder, but I've already gotten 3 unsolicited pitches for advertising on the site (three A-list advertisers too). (This is odd because I haven't even thought about advertising yet.) I turned them all down because they were popups and page view related (no point annoying visitors with a pop-up and then only making a buck or two a month on it because traffic is low), but I think I'm getting the pitches because advertisers know, instantly, who they're getting with my site.
Jeez, no kidding. Not getting an item for 70 days can tamp the spirits of even the most psychotically enthused and easily amused impulse buyer. And, unfortunately, only an impulse buyer is going to want a George Bush action figure to begin with.Chet,
You can definitely blame the merchant, since they're not shipping the damn things for about 2 months.
asjunk
You would be surprised how many LOTR movies or Harry Potter books get ordered 6 months out. But this may be a merchant who doesn't show the stat until the item ships. Fair enough then. Been too busy lately to keep up on things.
Penny Arcade has a massive audience, but actually checking today, I don't see any prizey ads. I think they come and go, but it seems all the major comics are able to get decent advertising. I know PA also does their club PA thing and used to just ask for donations.
They also get some deal on their bandwidth from the pricks at homelan, so that helps. If they had to pay full price for their bandwidth, it would make a serious dent in their bottom line.
Chet
It's pretty boneheaded placement. If they read the site, they'd realize that outside of, say, The Nation Blogging community, we may be the least likely place on earth to purchase Dubya dolls. Even our conservatives hate the fucker.
Yeah, the only expense they probably have is their own salaries. That definitely helps, and the fact that they aren't giving a chunk of income to a middleman like UGO.
quatoria, i placed the banner and ad, not them. That is me. And it is good placement, or was. At one time QT3 were 25-40 year old males with disposable income who might buy a funny trinket.
Now I guess I should run ads for the latest backstreet boys cd.
Chet
Well, it's good to know you've found a new niche. I was wondering why you'd gone so long without posting - now, in just one day, five or six separate posts whining and griping about how godawful GT3 has become, because it had the temerity to change in any way!
I think that Penny Arcade, much as it would be nice to lionise them for getting Internet advertising right, have ended up with a massive amount of readers and almost no overheads. Therefore, they can offer insanely cheap deals in terms of page impressions for the dollar (anecdotally, from someone I know who advertised with them, one tenth of the price of similar sites), and as a result, can pick and choose only the cool advertisers.
Clearly, this isn't the norm - even prestige paper-magazines such as Wired don't precisely go 'you're not cool enough to buy a page in our magazine'. But on the other hand, it's definitely true that Penny Arcade are doing something right, in that - they have advertisers that they think are cool, and then they plug the advertisers in their news posts, and then people actually BUY from their advertisers. It works.
But again, I'm really not sure how many people would get away with that. Can you imagine most news sites saying 'hey, check out our new advertiser, their products are GREAT!', in an editorial section of the site? People need to be sure that you're not bullshitting them for the ad money, and as I said, there's very few Web personalities well-enough defined that you trust 'em enough about that - notwithstanding the problems of needing to seem editorially independent for impartial news sites.
So, definitely a tricky problem. There may be some middle ground to do with more carefully tailoring your ads to subject matter, if it's actual clickthrus and purchases that matter nowadays.
so how much money can you make these days with a site that has, say 2million page views a month?
There are so many ways to try and make it work right now, it is hard to say. Using fast click, we get .60 cpm. But using google adwords, we get anywhere from .10/cpm to $5.00/cpm. It really bounces around, I know some people who do rather well with them.
On QT3, running the compuexpert ad - it makes less than .10 cpm and i suspect much less in reality as the text link probably does better. But again since the page shows from here mainly come from the forums, most ad networks will not let QT3 into their network, no google (officially but i tried them anyways) no fast click etc. So a .10/cpm is probably the best banner we have run here.
Qt3 will have a slight change coming up (No mark i didn't forget, need to email you about it this weekend) which will help with non-forum page shows.
The consistency is gone, and that is the hardest part.
In the old days - 2million? $6-10,000. Way too much... now $5-50?
Chet
in conclusion, hosting your own website still sucks ass...
Or you can run popups or Interstitial ads, Blue is probably getting between $15-$25/cpm on those Interstitial ads. That is why people run them.
Chet
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