6 ms·

I've spent about $100 trying to promote my history podcast curation site on Twitter, and only got about 5 hits.

by mason240 10y ago

siquick 10y ago
In comparison to FB ads (and my experience), Twitter ads are absolutely useless.
- intrasight 10y ago
  And since FB ads are useless, that's saying something
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    The ads on both platforms are primarily useful for gathering a following local to the platform. For example, on Facebook, you want to buy likes/engagement with your page, not outbound stuff. On Twitter, you want to buy followers. Once you have a following, you engage with them and use the content you post to drive them to your site where you (presumably) make money from them. The ads on the social platforms are not worth anything if you're using them as general CPC ads to try to drive traffic to your site. In fact, I've found this is even true for Google/Adwords.
    - siquick 10y ago
      I don't understand this logic. I've had great success in driving traffic my FB to websites, and for much lower cost than Adwords. Buying FB page likes seems like a pointless exercise considering that only a tiny percentage of your users actually ever see your posts unless you boost them.
  - biztos 10y ago
    I have no idea how useful/useless FB ads are for advertisers in general, but as a FB user I definitely click on more ads than I do on Google. Unsurprisingly, the stuff I read, "like" and respond to seems to result in better targeting than the stuff I search for and click away to.
    - intrasight 10y ago
      My comment was based upon what I've heard from people who advertise on FB. I filter out the ads so I don't know what I'm missing.
abrodersen 10y ago
I love history podcasts! What's your site?
- mason240 10y ago
  Thanks! It's History-Podcasts.com. I am a couple of months behind in putting in new shows, but there are over 200 there now.
  - VLM 10y ago
    That's a nice site. I remember when the entire marketplace was "The History of Rome" several years ago. Consider ultra narrowcasting. I don't think the British History Podcast guy (who is awesome to listen to BTW and officially VLM endorsed) is going to demand the full $100 to advertise and would surely result in orders of magnitude more than five clicks, for example. As a user of your service I'd advise that a big problem with podcasts that are essentially volunteer operations is long dry spells. The bulgarian history podcast, which is much more interesting than it sounds, although the intro music makes my kids cry, had a roughly five month dry spell this spring where I unsubscribed in my podcast catcher because I thought the podcast had completely died. Cool, its not dead. Now I should resubscribe although the point of this story is you need to automate or productize or make more efficient that process, not just dumb luck that I run into the guy who runs the site on HN so I click around some of my old favorites and holy cow the other BHP is back, thru pure luck. There must be some kind of technological magic that could be spun somehow to help volunteers having a dry spell from having their audience melt away. Reminder service on the web or email to let people know dead podcasts have been resurrected? You might even be able to generalize this magic, whatever it is, to let people know about resurrected open source projects or similar. "Its not dead, its just pining for the fjords".com or something
  - drspacemonkey 10y ago
    I don't know if you're taking show suggestions, but I'd like to recommend The Dollop. The Dollop is a bi-weekly* American History Podcast. Every week, Dave Anthony reads a story to his friend, Gareth Reynolds, who has no idea what the topic is going to be about. It's hysterical, and has a huge following. They do live shows and everything. Just finished up a tour of Australia. *(bi-weekly means whatever Dave wants it to mean)
toomuchtodo 10y ago
Have you considered running Reddit ads on history-centric subreddits?
- mason240 10y ago
  Yeah, actually. I also set up /r/HistoryPodcast and spent about $10 on Reddit twice. Both times I had an ongoing AMA with a podcaster and targeted /r/history. I thought that would be a sure thing, but even then I only had a handful of click-throughs.
- wcummings 10y ago
  Reddit ads must be like dirt fucking cheap too, right? Seems like they have a lot of extra inventory, based on the # of "internal" subreddit ads I see.
- flukus 10y ago
  I really wish reddit had a "show me previous ads" feature. A lot of they ads are stuff I'm interested in, but I don't notice them until I'm moving away from the page.

I've spent about $100 trying to promote my history podcast curation site on Twitter, and only got about 5 hits.

siquick 10y ago

In comparison to FB ads (and my experience), Twitter ads are absolutely useless.

intrasight 10y ago
And since FB ads are useless, that's saying something
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  The ads on both platforms are primarily useful for gathering a following local to the platform. For example, on Facebook, you want to buy likes/engagement with your page, not outbound stuff. On Twitter, you want to buy followers. Once you have a following, you engage with them and use the content you post to drive them to your site where you (presumably) make money from them. The ads on the social platforms are not worth anything if you're using them as general CPC ads to try to drive traffic to your site. In fact, I've found this is even true for Google/Adwords.
  - siquick 10y ago
    I don't understand this logic. I've had great success in driving traffic my FB to websites, and for much lower cost than Adwords. Buying FB page likes seems like a pointless exercise considering that only a tiny percentage of your users actually ever see your posts unless you boost them.
- biztos 10y ago
  I have no idea how useful/useless FB ads are for advertisers in general, but as a FB user I definitely click on more ads than I do on Google. Unsurprisingly, the stuff I read, "like" and respond to seems to result in better targeting than the stuff I search for and click away to.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    My comment was based upon what I've heard from people who advertise on FB. I filter out the ads so I don't know what I'm missing.

abrodersen 10y ago

I love history podcasts! What's your site?

mason240 10y ago
Thanks! It's History-Podcasts.com. I am a couple of months behind in putting in new shows, but there are over 200 there now.
- VLM 10y ago
  That's a nice site. I remember when the entire marketplace was "The History of Rome" several years ago. Consider ultra narrowcasting. I don't think the British History Podcast guy (who is awesome to listen to BTW and officially VLM endorsed) is going to demand the full $100 to advertise and would surely result in orders of magnitude more than five clicks, for example. As a user of your service I'd advise that a big problem with podcasts that are essentially volunteer operations is long dry spells. The bulgarian history podcast, which is much more interesting than it sounds, although the intro music makes my kids cry, had a roughly five month dry spell this spring where I unsubscribed in my podcast catcher because I thought the podcast had completely died. Cool, its not dead. Now I should resubscribe although the point of this story is you need to automate or productize or make more efficient that process, not just dumb luck that I run into the guy who runs the site on HN so I click around some of my old favorites and holy cow the other BHP is back, thru pure luck. There must be some kind of technological magic that could be spun somehow to help volunteers having a dry spell from having their audience melt away. Reminder service on the web or email to let people know dead podcasts have been resurrected? You might even be able to generalize this magic, whatever it is, to let people know about resurrected open source projects or similar. "Its not dead, its just pining for the fjords".com or something
- drspacemonkey 10y ago
  I don't know if you're taking show suggestions, but I'd like to recommend The Dollop. The Dollop is a bi-weekly* American History Podcast. Every week, Dave Anthony reads a story to his friend, Gareth Reynolds, who has no idea what the topic is going to be about. It's hysterical, and has a huge following. They do live shows and everything. Just finished up a tour of Australia. *(bi-weekly means whatever Dave wants it to mean)

toomuchtodo 10y ago

Have you considered running Reddit ads on history-centric subreddits?

mason240 10y ago
Yeah, actually. I also set up /r/HistoryPodcast and spent about $10 on Reddit twice. Both times I had an ongoing AMA with a podcaster and targeted /r/history. I thought that would be a sure thing, but even then I only had a handful of click-throughs.
wcummings 10y ago
Reddit ads must be like dirt fucking cheap too, right? Seems like they have a lot of extra inventory, based on the # of "internal" subreddit ads I see.
flukus 10y ago
I really wish reddit had a "show me previous ads" feature. A lot of they ads are stuff I'm interested in, but I don't notice them until I'm moving away from the page.