[InclinedPlane]

These are not independent variables though. People won't visit your site just to see the ads (milliondollarwebpage notwithstanding). In order for your ads to generate revenue you need content that people want to see. And you need people to revisit your site often.

If you just cram a lot of ads into a page you'll increase revenues for a little while, then your readership goes away and then your cpm rates go way down.

If you ensure your site has engaging content and is a pleasurable experience for your readers then you'll be able to make more revenue off of fewer ads. More so if you go the extra mile and ensure your ads are high quality and relevant to the audience (to the degree to where eventually they almost become endorsements and recommendations). Take a look at penny-arcade.com, for example, I can guarantee they make plenty off of those ads and they wouldn't be doing better if they'd simply crammed the screen 99% full with other ads.

It's just as important to cultivate your own brand (which is ultimately what you are selling by way of 3rd party advertising) as it is to hawk other people's brands.

[tmarthal]

... and the idea is that there are advertisements which generate revenue on the second, third and fourth page in the site that they visit. So his 99.5% metric is that 60% or so of that screen is trying to drive traffic to other articles on the site.

[rhizome]

Hmm, not sure I'm following you here.

[tmarthal]

What I was trying to connote is that 60%+ of that home page was devoted to driving traffic to other stories in the same site.

A publisher's home page shouldn't necessarily be a place for content (even though it is serving ads). A page's home page is to drive traffic to articles in the site (that _also_ serve ads); this is the 60% navigation and "Non-business Related Filler" that the article talks about.

[InclinedPlane]

If you think the entire purpose of a site is just to generate advertising revenue then you should give up, close down your site, and replace it with a domain parking site. You'll still get ad revenue but your costs will be almost nothing, and you won't have to put any work into it at all. It's win/win.