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.
