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by redwall_hp
2500 days ago
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It was more profitable, especially for small sites. I used to cold email businesses and ask them if they wanted to buy a static banner on my blog, back in the 2000s. I made a few hundred a month on a site that had 30k views per month. You're lucky to get a fraction of that now. Advertisers get a much lower cost through AdSense and a ton of metrics. |
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You forget to factor in the time you spent to build the e-mail list, write a nice e-mail and send it, and repeat that every once in a while when people cancel. And you have to track payments, see if someone's credit cards runs out so they fail to renew the subscription, etc.
And let's not forget the fact that there was almost no competition - for businesses who didn't want to spend the time to research the Internet, the decision was most likely between advertising on your website or not advertising online at all.
BTW, you can still do that. I still go out, research and get people to advertise directly. I split the ad space on my website into premium and "regular" sections depending on page traffic and actual place on the page (header, footer, etc.). Premium has banners manually checked and contracted, hosted on the same domain as the rest of website's content, so no ad blocking and content very relevant to the website. The rest of space is filled with Google Ads. Premium banners earn about 5x more than Google Ads, but require that I maintain it. Google Ads just run without me having to do anything.