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The author's approach to estimating the value of traffic, even by subjective criteria, strikes me as puzzling, somewhat arbitrarily valuing ad-free page views a

The author's approach to estimating the value of traffic, even by subjective criteria, strikes me as puzzling, somewhat arbitrarily valuing ad-free page views at $0.02, despite the fact that they generate no direct revenue. > My website is important to me because it is what I have accomplished & is my livelihood, and if people are not reading it, that is bad. How bad? In lieu of advertising it’s hard to directly quantify the value of a page-view, so I can instead ask myself hypothetically, would I trade ~1 week of traffic for $360 (~$0.02/view, or to put it the other way, $18720/year)? Probably; that’s about the right number - with my current parlous income, I cannot casually throw away hundreds or thousands of dollars for some additional traffic and so I feel comfortable valuing page-views at ~$0.02 or a bit less. If your income is as parlous as you say, then it seems bizarre to value any amount of unmonetized traffic over cash flow. People call page views a "vanity metric" with good reason. You can't put food on your plate with page views. By valuing a single page view at $0.02, you're literally doing work for free, "for exposure." We all make fun of businesses who ask professionals to work for $0 for exposure. It's no better when you're making yourself work for unfair terms! To put this another way, I think the author can probably arrange to buy relevant traffic via Google AdWords at or less than $0.02 per page view. If traffic ("exposure") is that valuable, then, yes, stop running ads on your site, and instead buy ads of your own. But if that sounds outrageous to you, if you would never reach into your pocket to pay Google $360 for a week's worth of website traffic, then you should rethink whether unmonetized page views are really as valuable as you think they are.

gwern 9y ago
One can have enough money to value traffic but not enough to spend thousands of dollars for small amounts of additional traffic. As you have less money, the remaining money becomes much more valuable... > it seems bizarre to value any amount of ad-free traffic over cash flow. Also, while I do not know for certain how much each page-view is worth, I do know for certain that it is not exactly $0! Errors made on the assumption it is a cent or two are surely less than errors made on the assumption it is literally worthless. (As it happens, the introspection was pointless because the effect came nowhere near the threshold, and if it had, I would've had to reintrospect anyway since my Patreon has been working better and I have more money since I began the A/B test in January. There's no reason to not revisit thresholds if circumstances have changed, after all.)
- dfabulich 9y ago
  > One can have enough money to value traffic but not enough to spend thousands of dollars for small amounts of additional traffic. As you have less money, the remaining money becomes much more valuable... If you have very little money, then every cent counts, including AdSense cents. Page views count only to the extent that they convert into something: Patreon patrons, consulting gigs, or what have you. And I'm not saying your page views convert at $0 to those things, but I think it's plausible that you're off by an order of magnitude, e.g. that an ad-free page view is worth only a tenth of a cent.
Mz 9y ago
He has Patreon. Ads are not the only way to turn traffic into money.

gwern 9y ago

One can have enough money to value traffic but not enough to spend thousands of dollars for small amounts of additional traffic. As you have less money, the remaining money becomes much more valuable... > it seems bizarre to value any amount of ad-free traffic over cash flow. Also, while I do not know for certain how much each page-view is worth, I do know for certain that it is not exactly $0! Errors made on the assumption it is a cent or two are surely less than errors made on the assumption it is literally worthless. (As it happens, the introspection was pointless because the effect came nowhere near the threshold, and if it had, I would've had to reintrospect anyway since my Patreon has been working better and I have more money since I began the A/B test in January. There's no reason to not revisit thresholds if circumstances have changed, after all.)

dfabulich 9y ago
> One can have enough money to value traffic but not enough to spend thousands of dollars for small amounts of additional traffic. As you have less money, the remaining money becomes much more valuable... If you have very little money, then every cent counts, including AdSense cents. Page views count only to the extent that they convert into something: Patreon patrons, consulting gigs, or what have you. And I'm not saying your page views convert at $0 to those things, but I think it's plausible that you're off by an order of magnitude, e.g. that an ad-free page view is worth only a tenth of a cent.

Mz 9y ago

He has Patreon. Ads are not the only way to turn traffic into money.