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Whenever I see a webapp that's popular and has no ads, I can't help but wonder why. Sure, maybe they have a non-ad-based business model further down the pipelin

by garply 18y ago

Whenever I see a webapp that's popular and has no ads, I can't help but wonder why. Sure, maybe they have a non-ad-based business model further down the pipeline, but what do they lose by putting up some ads? I doubt that they would lose many users, and it would slow their burn rate, at least.

dsil 18y ago
In nearly all cases you won't make enough money to increase your burn rate at all. When you're focusing on growing your user base, its not worth it to lose a few users and generally make your site a little less usable and appealing for $100ish dollars a month.
- garply 18y ago
  Really? The notion that this many (http://www.statsaholic.com/twitter.com http://www.statsaholic.com/twitter.com) eyeballs a day (with a lot of those people being early adopters) is worth $100 / month strikes me as completely incredulous. I personally would pay well over $100 a month to buy ads on their site.
  - dsil 18y ago
    Oh no no, I meant most sites...twitter could be making thousands of dollars a month, probably tens of thousands. But they're going for acquisition/valuation of hundreds of millions of dollars. Ads would slow their growth, if only a bit, but even a few hundred thousand in ad revenue at this point isn't worth that, in my opinion, and apparently theirs as well.
- ackkchoo 18y ago
  I agree with this to a point, but I think that it is also important to test out ads from an early stage, just to see how "viable" the business model really is. There are so many variations in placement, eCPM, clickthrough, etc across different sites that the only real way to know whether or not something works for a particular site is to test it. Without this sort of testing, it's difficult to gauge how much you really have to grow to become viable. Unfortunately, I think a lot of companies use this argument to justify a non-sustainable business model, in the hopes that once they get enough "eyeballs", the monetization will follow. So they don't put up any ads at all, then when they do eventually put them up, they are likely to be shocked at the actual (likely to be much, much lower) earnings. Another advantage to putting up ads early is that users become accustomed to them from the start. Going from no ads to ads, especially after a community has grown used to the concept of no ads at all, can cause the same loss of users.

by garply 18y ago

dsil 18y ago

In nearly all cases you won't make enough money to increase your burn rate at all. When you're focusing on growing your user base, its not worth it to lose a few users and generally make your site a little less usable and appealing for $100ish dollars a month.

garply 18y ago
Really? The notion that this many (http://www.statsaholic.com/twitter.com http://www.statsaholic.com/twitter.com) eyeballs a day (with a lot of those people being early adopters) is worth $100 / month strikes me as completely incredulous. I personally would pay well over $100 a month to buy ads on their site.
- dsil 18y ago
  Oh no no, I meant most sites...twitter could be making thousands of dollars a month, probably tens of thousands. But they're going for acquisition/valuation of hundreds of millions of dollars. Ads would slow their growth, if only a bit, but even a few hundred thousand in ad revenue at this point isn't worth that, in my opinion, and apparently theirs as well.
ackkchoo 18y ago
I agree with this to a point, but I think that it is also important to test out ads from an early stage, just to see how "viable" the business model really is. There are so many variations in placement, eCPM, clickthrough, etc across different sites that the only real way to know whether or not something works for a particular site is to test it. Without this sort of testing, it's difficult to gauge how much you really have to grow to become viable. Unfortunately, I think a lot of companies use this argument to justify a non-sustainable business model, in the hopes that once they get enough "eyeballs", the monetization will follow. So they don't put up any ads at all, then when they do eventually put them up, they are likely to be shocked at the actual (likely to be much, much lower) earnings. Another advantage to putting up ads early is that users become accustomed to them from the start. Going from no ads to ads, especially after a community has grown used to the concept of no ads at all, can cause the same loss of users.