This might just be my conspiracy radar turned to 11, however, it seems very suspect that a blog with only 1 post ever, is using that post to rave about AirBnB right in the middle of their storm.
I want to supplement this by saying I really admire AirBnB and have no doubt that they will over come this security lapse with the killer product and marketplace they've built. However, this suspicious orphan blog post has my BS antennae throwing out sparks.
To clarify, the poster is making $1,129 in rent per thousand views of his property page on Airbnb (as opposed to, say, craigslist). He is not trying to suggest that advertising (something besides his property) earns any revenue.
It feels good to read this kind of article after all taht storm. I'm pretty sure that guys at Airbnb are doing a great job.
It feels really nice when the community stands up and somehow defends/promotes the products they like, specially when that product is a result from hard work.
Page views and site visitors are usually different metrics. I don't know how the Airbnb stats are calculated, but I'm guessing you've had fewer than 246 visitors—which means your conversion rate would be higher than 1%.
Are you sure you want to use your real name on this blog? You are advertising the fact that you are breaking the law in San Francisco (short term rental without a license) and violating your lease (subletting your apartment).
I'm not sure it translates. I've got a place, listed on AirBnB which is almost always available for rent. It's a vacation home. http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/59577
We've had 458 page views and made $262. Hardly astonishing. We do rent it locally through a property manager, they get much fewer page views, but have repeat clients and make us $5k to $10k per year. At least in South America, AirBnb might as well not exist at all. Nobody uses it to rent.
No, it's just renting out the rooms. I know the "CPM" analogy doesn't really fit perfectly but the point is that the Airbnb service is so effective at driving traffic it makes me more than a dollar per pageview on avg. Of course it's their site but you can think of it sort of like an e-commerce platform where I can open a store and sell my extra space. It works super well.
It's not the traffic that's earning the revenue, it's your property which allows you to charge for the rent. A more sane metric would be to compute your "profit", which is your income, the rent, minus your expenses in renting out the property:
- amortized property deterioration
- administrative time dealing with the tenants
- opportunity costs (the interest/ROI that you could expect the principal to bring
if it was not tied up in your house)
and then you can compare this profit and the fees AirBNB is charging for it against other channels (such as making your own page and driving traffic to it via Adwords).
Just because I'm selling $10'000 diamonds at 50% discount on a website which brings me 1 sale every 100 page-views doesn't mean that each pageview is worth $50.
Ok. Now it makes sense. I had the same question others had. I think you're saying if the money you earned from renting were divided by the visits to your listing, you'd end up with the number you posted.
Question, are you breaking even (rent - sublet earnings)?
Good job on the earnings but there's not a whole lot we can take away from the CPM figure. I'm not sure there is anything to compare it to besides other AirBnB listings and the only other data point we currently have is an order of magnitude better (246/$1129).
What's the point of this? Using terms like CPM makes no sense in this context. Come back to us when you're making $1129 with a million impressions, buddy.
I want to supplement this by saying I really admire AirBnB and have no doubt that they will over come this security lapse with the killer product and marketplace they've built. However, this suspicious orphan blog post has my BS antennae throwing out sparks.