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I spent 3ish years making these kinds of websites (specifically those click bait-y “Can you name these Canadian snack foods??” quiz sites). They generate _a lot
by jameshush 4y ago
I spent 3ish years making these kinds of websites (specifically those click bait-y “Can you name these Canadian snack foods??” quiz sites). They generate _a lot_ more revenue. Like more than double.
Digital publishing’s main business model is paying as little as possible for 1 click and monetizing that click as much as possible on the other end. The sales “funnel” isn’t a funnel here, its just two steps “1. Show link to article . 2. Show ads.”
Now if you’re an organic heavy site like NFL.com, you get plenty of free clicks just by reposting articles to social media. Its more important to keep your brand strong with a couple of small, highly paid ad units.
But if you’re just an average publisher, you gotta literally pay for attention. It turns into a game of spending $1.00 for an ad on Facebook/Tabola/Outbrain/Snap/etc and trying to make $1.30 when they land on the page.
Long term bet IMO is still high quality organic content makes more profit, but you can still make a lot with 3-4 engineers and average-ish content.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sha256sum 4y agoThanks for reminding me of the pleasure I feel having a setup that ignores all of the work you and other like you have done in this field. Personally, this whole comment is ludicrous… but I can’t explain why. Maybe it’s just a smell
- jameshush 4y agoI agree hahaha. That’s why I got out.
- bradwood 4y ago3ish years! I hope the pay was good!
- jameshush 4y agoPay was great, people were excellent, location was by the beach, just couldn’t handle spending 40 hours a week tricking old people into clicking on banner ads. I wish I could! Everything else was great. Now I’m a sales engineer and get to help people actually solve problems :)
- bradwood 4y agoFair play brother.
- solarkraft 4y agoThanks for the insight. The relatively low margins you suggest indicate that it might be possible to make this awfulness unprofitable with relatively small changes.
- jameshush 4y agoYup, it’s already happening. Getting rid of third party cookies was a big one. Downside is if you can’t advertise with banner ads, you need another way. Trend seems to be making content that’s just a big ad (e.g. anything that’s a top 10 list)