With Tim Bray exiting the AdSense business, it may seem to be a strange time to consider advertising, but that’s precisely what we’re doing. My interest was piqued when I read the articles that Bray describes containing somewhat apocryphal tales of 10K months via blogging. You might expect that RedMonk would turn a blind eye towards such pieces a.) because they’re not entirely credible, and b.) because they apply to a traffic level that we can’t compete with at the present time (and I, personally, hope to never achieve). These would be reasonable objections, and we have no expectations to achieve anything beyond the relative modest sums that Bray’s generated. But one of the things that James and I have noticed since we started blogging more prolifically is a most definite upward trend in traffic; even discounting for the proportion of the hits that represent clueless spammers, we’re still attracting somewhere on the order of 10K to 20K new views per month (and my recent /.ing - see the link to Daniel Robbins - shouldn’t hurt in that department). This growth has been nothing if not consistent. Monetizing that traffic is thus something we’re at least willing to entertain.
So that in and of itself is interesting, but when you throw in the fact that we’re migrating towards an increasingly open source model where we give a great deal of analysis away for free, and it becomes more interesting. To be clear, we expect our primary revenue stream to remain as it is now - a mix of enterprises, finance professionals and vendors (dominated by the latter) - for the short, medium and long term. But given that we forgo many of the obvious revenue choices bolstering the traditional industry analysts (the main reason I’m still not driving a BMW ;), we’re considering alternative approaches that continue to allow us to grow while not jeopardizing what we’re able to provide for free. Advertising is one answer, as is allowing commercial syndication of our content (we’ve been approached on this front as well). To qualify the above, I’m speaking of advertising in the unobstrusive AsSense context, rather than jamming in more offensive banner or inline ads.
But we wouldn’t dream of pursuing such an approach without at least soliciting opinions of all of you. So the question then is simple: how would you feel about us advertising on the home pages of our blogs (possible), or in the individual full-text feeds (less likely) themselves? Would you walk away? Do you not care? Would very much appreciate any impressions - positive or negative - on the possibility. As always, your assistance in helping us navigate the path from traditional, proprietary industry analyst firm to open source reasearchers is much appreciated.
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I don’t really care about ads on the home page. In the feeds, they’re more annoying but still not enough to make me stop if the title is glaringly marked AD: or similar. My Scientific American feed is interspersed with ads, but I care enough about the content that it doesn’t bother me.
pretty much my thinking exactly. i too find feed ads at least mildly irritating, but i’ll put up with them as long as a.) they’re providing a full text feed and b.) the content’s interesting. i know we can accomodate a, b’s a matter for the readers to decide.
the only reason its worth considering is that at least on my space, the RSS traffic is far more significant than the traffic to the home page, excluding admittedly important trends like the occasional popular link and our Google visitors (i get tons of these).
not sure what we’ll do, but appreciate the feedback in any case.
Web pages, any and all, seem fine but one problem I’ve seen with feed ads is they sometimes seem to cause individual entries to show as updated when all that’s changed is the ad (happens often on /., for instance). So less favorable on the feed though if you could get a pure text ad would not be a problem to me.
Bill: after the PubSub/Industry Standard fiasco with a constantly updating feed, i can *promise* that we’ll never go that route. that was a disaster. instead, i’m thinking along the lines of the Google AdSense feed ads, which are at the bottom and don’t seem to affect the updated status (in my experience). but either way, i’m pretty averse to the idea.
I say put those suckers in. Tell us if you make any money from them. I’m kind of shocked that Bray didn’t think he wasn’t making enough money off them: but, I guess he’s already loaded, so what’s another $100-200 every month or so?
Ads in the web site could be just OK, but please don’t put them to the feeds (at least not yet). In this blog best place to put ads would be propably in the top right corner of pages. That way most of the visitors would see them well enough.
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