(Topic ID: 54224)

Robin is requesting donations to fix slow response

By txstargazer3

10 years ago


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    #51 10 years ago

    Ads can be tastefully done and respect your audience. But Robin has to be careful with it.

    Look at daringfireball.net. For those that don't know, that is an apple/tech news related webblog written by John Gruber. He has 3 different types of ads, as well as annual T-shirt Sales and occasional mention of his Amazon affiliate link at the bottom of the page and in rare posts about different products he likes.

    The first kind of ad is from the deck network, which does the hard work of selling the ad slots, but they limit their ads to only a single small ad on their member sites page, with a single graphic and a short tagline. The ads are also always related to the core audience of those sites (they are all tech/nerd related sites.)

    The other 2 kinds of ads John Gruber sells himself, which are weekly slots in his linked list and his rss feed. Because his site gets so much traffic, he sells out months in advance.

    All of his sources of revenue respect his readership, are unobtrusive, and they allow him to live pretty well with the site as his full time job.

    That probably isn't a perfect analogy with a site like this, but I think there are a lot of good ideas there.

    1) If you go with ads, many won't donate because they feel they are paying with their ad views. BUT, you should keep the donations, and sell T-Shirts at the $50 level. Once a year do a sales drive for donations/Tshirt sales, and get an annual infusion of cash. We can hold user created T-shirt contests here to pick the shirts, and ALL of the order fulfillment could be done by a third party. The only work on Robin's part would be making the business arrangement with a fulfillment center like cafe express or something, and announcing the design contests. I would love to submit designs, and I think perks could be given to the top 3 winners. New designs every year will bring new donations, and I think most people here can't get enough of nerdy pinball related shirts. I think the $50 T-shirt level was the most popular donation level of the papa-TV kickstarter.

    2) Create non-flash banner ads, fill them with rotating pinside related info, along with the occasional reminder that you could buy these ads if you wanted. Let the ad buyers come to you. I fail to see why every pinball related vendor wouldn't want a banner ad on this site. Once they sell out, and they probably will, raise the price. But keep it simple. 1-4 slots per day, and sell it flat rate based on historical traffic volume. Make it mean something to get that banner ad. Maintain final say about what goes into that valuable web real estate. If you think for a minute that the content someone wants to put in that slot disrespects your readership, then reject it.

    3) Resist the urge to supplement your ad revenue with Flash based bullshit grab your attention PPC or PPM ads. Those alienate your readers, and just encourage ad-blockers.

    Honestly, I think this could be accomplished fairly easily, and could provide the site with a steady stream of revenue. Donations are great, but the site may have grown past them. Gruber started Daringfireball.net with the intention of keeping it user supported, and it worked for a while. He eventually explored other revenue streams, but he never strayed from the principle that his webpage should always respect the reader. I have no idea what the traffic is to this site, but I have to think it's growing every day, and by implementing a few of these things in a careful way, It should help Robin tremendously in keeping the thing going. This is a unique product with a very captive obsessed audience, and now is an opportunity for the right advertisers, Robin, and the readers to all benefit.

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