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by petercooper 5961 days ago
You're right, but since you follow me on Twitter, you must have missed my numbers on this.. ;-)

On Ruby Inside, Rails Inside, and Ruby Flow, I run a cpl million ad impressions each month and make an OK amount of money from it despite the CPM being deathly low (say $2-$3 on a per ad basis). The CTR, however? It's south of 0.5%.

I also ran an Adsense for Feeds experiment for a few days recently. Don't have the numbers to hand but it was 1 click in approximately 16,000 impressions.. and these are real, unblocked impressions. I made 40 cents. Developers don't click on ads. "Geeks" do, though, IMHO.. otherwise sites like Slashdot wouldn't bother.

Compare this to Adsense ads on my old, archived personal blog.. and they run at over 20%.
2 comments
ohashi 5961 days ago
I click ads. They interest me often, but I cannot honestly think of the last time (if ever) that I bought something from one.

The less web savvy the audience the higher the click through, best CTRs I ever experienced were on myspace related sites, my target audience was 15 year old kids judging from profile links I saw.

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larrywright 5961 days ago
Yeah, I had seen your numbers, but I was referring to some sort of larger study on the matter.

As for Slashdot, I always sort of wondered whether or not the appeal to those advertisers was less clickthrough and more name recognition. That is something that I think is a bit under-rated. I think that matters when evaluating products - I know that I tend to favor brands that I've heard of in some way vs something completely unfamiliar.

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petercooper 5961 days ago
As for Slashdot, I always sort of wondered whether or not the appeal to those advertisers was less clickthrough and more name recognition.

That has been cited by some advertisers, for sure - especially those who are recently funded or have larger branding budgets.

Take New Relic, for example. They're sponsoring The Ruby Show for I'd guess (and I don't know for sure, but basing on rates of similar podcasts) at least $300-$500 per show? There's no way they're getting that much business from people listening to the show checking them out at that very moment. In terms of brand awareness, though, $5-8k a year is nothing if almost every Ruby developer has at least heard of you..

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