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How Blocking Search Engines Can Increase Ad Click-Throughs
- jacquesm 17y agoThat's very interesting. It would be nice to see corroboration from other local periodicals doing the same to see if it holds up.
- Semiapies 17y agoSomewhat interesting phenomenon that the writer gives no real analysis or background on, just, "We did this out of spite, and look, effective frequency!" Trying out dailyrepublic.com, I wonder how much of this is inflated by the way the search engine appears to turn up multiple versions of the same articles, with altered bylines and modified phrasings (I searched for "murder" and saw a number of such duplicates). Someone looking for more information on a local story could apparently open up many pages - all with ads in the header - just to find slightly altered versions of the same two or three articles. This appears to be borne out in the other two sites the guy mentions running. Hilariously, searching for "murder" on davisenterprise.com brought out two completely identical articles on Anwar al-Awlaki - but searching for "Anwar al-Awlaki" returned zero results. Thank goodness they weren't using Google or anything... Looking at all three of these sites, squinting through all the ads and trying not to get distracted by the the help-wanted scrolling marquee lists, I think it might be wise to consider what Boydston doesn't say about the experiment - whether it's earned more money. Supply-and-demand certainly doesn't suggest that they're getting top dollar for all these ads. Nobody will remember to check, but it would be interesting to see whether these newspapers even still have websites (or exist) in 2, 3, or 5 years.