16 ms·

Is running ads on a programming blog worth it?

99 points by luu 12y ago

lifeisstillgood 12y ago
No. There are two main points for a programming blog - to keep your own notes in one place, and to try and raise your profile / build an audience to make the next contract or pay review a much happier experience. Neither of those are helped by ads, and the latter is probably negatively impacted. You have really impressive views afaik - which is why someone probably called you. But even so, you are thinking a rough likely income of 140usd a month. It's really hard to put the logical business case, but being the guy in the department who gets 100K views on his blog is easily worth 1700 usd at the annual pay review (read patio11 post on this subject). If you are a contractor or can build a network from the blog that 1700 pa is going to get wiped out in one deal. Stick a mailchimp form on your blog and keep writing interesting stuff.
- bemmu 12y ago
  Agreed. I suppose even Jeff Atwood's blog ultimately had the most impact when he used it to drive the initial traffic to StackOverflow.
- semperfaux 12y ago
  There are two main points for a programming blog - to keep your own notes in one place, and to try and raise your profile / build an audience to make the next contract or pay review a much happier experience. If one subscribes to your extremely limited view of what a "programming blog" should be or aspire to be, and what its author(s)' goals are or should be, then maybe this is reasonable. But I don't find that at all convincing. If you are a contractor or can build a network from the blog that 1700 pa is going to get wiped out in one deal. No... it'll still be there. And it'll be there if you have a bad month -- or year -- and you end up depending more than you'd want on that otherwise paltry sum. I'm not saying this is without merit. I'm just saying it's incredibly short-sighted. I like to look at the big picture as well, but to suggest that money you might bring in with minimal impact is necessarily useless in the face of the potential to bring in more money in other (largely or totally unrelated) ways strikes me as seriously out of touch with the lows reality can drop on your doorstep. Stick a mailchimp form on your blog and keep writing interesting stuff. This is at least much more reasonable than making blanket statements that start with "No."
  - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    Well the No was a direct answer to a direct question. :-) And I think that putting ads onto an otherwise nice and coherent personal site sends out all the wrong signals (it makes us judge this not as a personal site but as a commercial entity - which demands higher production standards (and oddly lowers the trustworthiness of his opinions on Intel die layouts etc). The small amount of advertising income is unlikely to ever pay for that trust loss - and if the OP is ever likely to find that income vital then they should fight for a pay rise today. I am negative on the value of broadcast style advertising - I would say that going for advertising dollars when you don't think they will pay for the young graduate you really ought to be hiring to do ad sales by phone is a bad idea. I really cannot see advertising being democratised by giving tiny slices to smaller and smaller outlets. Maybe affiliation sales will work at those levels but probably not.
Raphmedia 12y ago
This is very, very interesting. Thanks for the detailed informations! To be, ad monetization is a big black box. It's very helpful to have "insider" information.
AbhishekBiswal 12y ago
Then there's AdBlock, of which most of the people reading the blog might be aware of. The web looks weird with all the advertisements when I'm not on my own machine.
- oatmale 12y ago
  Let's be honest here, you didn't read the article.
ttty 12y ago
If you want to be evil do like these guys and freeze who has adblock, but I sincerely hope you don't do that (not everything is about money!): http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2to4pm/what_evil_bloggers_do_to_adblock_make_it_hang_by/ http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2to4pm/what_evil_blo...
jaxbot 12y ago
I tried running ads once, made about a penny in a month. Turned off the ads, cleaned up the site, focused on posting my notes/work, and ended up getting recruited through some engineers finding my posts when searching for info. To me, that was way more worth it than any ad revenue, but of course, your mileage may vary.
tomphoolery 12y ago
"Worse yet, this is getting worse over time. CPM is down something like 5x since the 90s, and continues to decline. Meanwhile, the percentage of people using ad blockers continues to increase." I hope that someday, the trend described above becomes so pronounced that it means the death of the ad-supported Internet. Perhaps there is a way to make good money on the web without resorting to such slimy tactics.
- Ripsaw 12y ago
  Like what? Make people pay for content? The internet costs money to maintain and I'm sorry to say but much of the convenience we enjoy is provided only because we look at a thousand+ ads a day. Do you really want to pay $5 a month for every site you want to read?
  - jlarocco 12y ago
    Meh. At one point, I'd have said, "Yes, I would prefer that." And I think in the long run we'd be better off. People love pointing out how much of the internet is available because of ads, but they don't point out how much of it is shitty and difficult to use because of ads. I can do without clicking through 5 pages of useless blog spam looking for a real article, and stories with seven paragraphs split up over 14 pages for ad purposes. Those are business models that deserve to die, IMO. I think a big chunk of the internet knows that going ad-free would mean they'd go from making small amounts of money off of ad clicking suckers, to making no money from anybody. But, that said, adblocking software is so good lately, I don't mind keeping the current setup. I'm not paying, and I'm not seeing the ads, so I get the best of both worlds.
toddynho 12y ago
Nice post! I wrote an answer on Quora for "How much do content producers who are apart of "The Deck" ad network make monthly?" which also gets into some additional details: http://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-apart-of-The-Deck-ad-network-make-monthly/answer/Todd-Garland http://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-a... (disclosure: I'm the Founder of BuySellAds who owns Carbon Ads) FWIW, when it comes to privacy, BuySellAds (and by extension Carbon Ads) is probably one of the few companies who don't actually do anything we don't tell you about with users' browsing data. We use it for forecasting what's available to be sold - that's it. We also wrote a handy tutorial that will help folks determine what % of visitors are using AdBlock: http://support.buysellads.com/knowledge_base/topics/how-to-figure-out-what-percentage-of-your-visitors-are-using-an-ad-blocker http://support.buysellads.com/knowledge_base/topics/how-to-f...
- Encosia 12y ago
  Keep in mind that a lot of ad blockers are blocking third-party analytics too these days, so measuring an AdBlock ratio by pushing events into GA isn't going to be very accurate. I display a gentle plea to whitelist my site (http://encosia.com/blog/wp-content/themes/encosia/carbon-alert.html http://encosia.com/blog/wp-content/themes/encosia/carbon-ale...) if the Carbon div isn't in the DOM after a little bit. I'm displaying that by loading an HTML fragment via AJAX, so I can grep my server-side logs and see how often that's loaded. I haven't checked lately, but the ratio was huge the last time I did look.
  - username223 12y ago
    Whitelisting you would also allow AddThis, Clicky, GA, G+, and Adobe. The "gentle plea" just makes your blog (or whatever it is) look annoying and desperate.
    - Encosia 12y ago
      That's not very nice. Surely you wouldn't look a real person you barely know in the eyes and call them annoying and desperate for something that trivial. Regardless, I was hesitant to add the nag, but I've only received positive feedback, e.g.: https://twitter.com/TweetsOfSumit/status/534623233920598017 https://twitter.com/TweetsOfSumit/status/534623233920598017 https://twitter.com/DanTheOther/status/550807053812252673 https://twitter.com/DanTheOther/status/550807053812252673 But, thanks for your opinion. It's interesting to hear what people think about it.
corin_ 12y ago
> Premium ads can get well over an order of magnitude higher CPM, so the picture might not be quite as bleak as I’m making it out to be. But to get premium ads you need to appeal to specific advertisers. What advertisers are interested in an audience that’s mostly programmers with an interest in low-level shenanigans? I've no experience marketing anything aimed at this audience, so have no idea what suitable companies think about this, nor what CPMs or CPAs they'd be used to seeing in their ad spends. But as a rule of thumb, targeted means more interesting to advertisers who want to hit that audience. For example if a VPS company wanted to advertise, where better than on a popular programmer's blog? (Again I have no idea on what margins or target CPAs a VPS company would have, so just a random example.) Of course, a targeted audience that doesn't interest any advertisers can have the opposite effect and drive your CPMs down, but more often than not it will help. It's just a question of will it help enough to justify the time getting the right advertisers to part with their money to advertise with you. (I also have no experience either selling or buying adverts for personal blogs, but the above rule of thumb is pretty scalable.) edit: Got distracted before finishing reading, and will now add my thoughts to his last paragraph: > There’s the argument that ad blocking is piracy and/or stealing, but I’ve never heard a convincing case made. If anything, I think that some of the people who make that argument step over the line, as when ars technica blocked people who used ad blockers, and then backed off and merely exhorted people to disable ad blocking for their site. I think most people would agree that directly exhorting people to click on ads and commit click fraud is unethical; asking people to disable ad blocking is a difference in degree, not in kind. People who use ad blockers are much less likely to click on ads, so having them disable ad blockers to generate impressions that are unlikely to convert strikes me as pretty similar to having people who aren’t interested in the product generate clicks. I make most of my living from people seeing digital adverts and I'd never argue its piracy or stealing. So I'm with the author on that one. As to preventing people from reading your website if they don't disable adblockers - I think it's a shitty thing to do, it's not something I'd ever be willing to suggest anyone does, but at the same time I don't see why a website shouldn't at least be allowed to do it. If a site does it and you don't like it then stop visiting. Personally I like sites that show "You're using an adblocker - you can keep using it if you like, but we'd really appreciate if you didn't". The reason for this is I disagree with the premise that those who use adblock won't click adverts. The number one reason for people using adblock is that too many advertisers/publishers allow shitty adverts. Adverts that pop out of the window. Or cover up content. Or use too much bandwidth or memory. Etc. If you're not one of those publishers, and you don't allow those kinds of advertisers on your site, then there's plenty of people who use adblock but might consider clicking on one or more of your adverts if they could be persuaded to view them. I'm not talking about asking them to click adverts, just that if they see them they might actually want to click on them. I don't have data to back this up, but have a couple of people I'm going to talk to and hopefully see if I can get numbers to demonstrate this, as I'm confident its the case. Alternatively if anyone reading this has a decent-sized audience (preferably with a high pageview to unique ratio - i.e. more loyal visitors rather than just visitors driven by search enginges) and would be interested in testing, feel free to get in touch to chuck about a couple of ideas. I couldn't really help on the execution side, but would happy to give advice on how to test if you'd be willing to share numbers with me afterwards. (The basic idea would be to see what % of people respond to polite requests to disable adblock, and how click rates are affected. If you have the technical chops to do more then could go further and either attempt to anonymously identify which clicks came from a previous adblock user, and also look at actual conversion rates rather than just click rates if your advertisers allow you access to this data.)
pherocity_ 12y ago
I block ads because advertisers/networks don't respect the do not track flag. I don't want to block ads, but I value my right to privacy more than I value your right to monetize my eyeballs. If the ad companies played in good faith, then I wouldn't have to circumvent them.
freddealmeida 12y ago
I would suggest you hyper target your site with key advertisers that can support content. For example, MS for Azure content. They can provide readers with real value. But requires you figure out how they can make it worth it for your audience.
IgorPartola 12y ago
I have a sneaking suspicion that certain groups of people are just much less susceptible to ads. I never click on ads. I mean, literally never. If you run an ad monetized site, I am the moocher who never makes you any money. If I search Google for something, and the result comes up as both an ad and a non-ad, I click on the non-ad link. If it only comes up as an ad, I keep searching. With me it's almost irrational, stemming from when long commercial breaks would interrupt cartoons and movies I watched. Ironically, I am building a mobile app that's going to be ad monetized (well, at least the free version will be). I suppose that makes me hypocrite. At the same time, I think I'm not alone. There's just something dreadful about having your decision making so directly influenced. It's sort of a "why are you trying to push this thing on me? Is it not good enough to stand on its own merit?" I believe that when I need something, I will find it and do my own research. This is why I also never put much value in Facebook. Who clicks on those ads? Aren't you just there to socialize? Edit: I should say that I am aware enough to realize that there are much more subtle form of marketing that definitely do influence me. If a person I respect gives something a good review, for example, I will be more likely to buy it. If a company has a good story to tell about themselves, that makes me think highly of them. If it's a product I've seen on Shark Tank I'm more likely to consider it because I'm more familiar with what they do. Ads are just too obvious about it for me.
- AtmaScout 12y ago
  I'll click the ad if it is for a company I don't like and have to use. For example, particular ISPs.
- orng 12y ago
  Yes, I am the same. I never, ever click on ads. If an ad happens to interest me (this happens extremely rarely) I google the product rather than clicking on the ad. For me however, I don't think it has anything to do with me not wanting to be influenced by ads and everything to do with the legacy of shady internet ads. Growing up you learned that clicking ads on the internet will get your computer infected or similar so you learned that all ads were shady and to stay away from them. Although I today know this is not always the case, the imprint remains.
- 12y ago
IgorPartola 12y ago
I have a sneaking suspicion that certain groups of people are just much less susceptible to ads. I never click on ads. I mean, literally never. If you run an ad monetized site, I am the moocher who never makes you any money. If I search Google for something, and the result comes up as both an ad and a non-ad, I click on the non-ad link. If it only comes up as an ad, I keep searching. With me it's almost irrational, stemming from when long commercial breaks would interrupt cartoons and movies I watched. Ironically, I am building a mobile app that's going to be ad monetized (well, at least the free version will be). I suppose that makes me hypocrite. At the same time, I think I'm not alone. There's just something dreadful about having your decision making so directly influenced. It's sort of a "why are you trying to push this thing on me? Is it not good enough to stand on its own merit?" I believe that when I need something, I will find it and do my own research. This is why I also never put much value in Facebook. Who clicks on those ads? Aren't you just there to socialize?
mdemare 12y ago
How about using affiliate links for products that are relevant to your audience? E.g. books about programming, hardware, etc...
- cobblestone 12y ago
  These are the worst. Marco Arment periodically does reviews of various things (coffee makers, headphones, etc), and he absolutely packs them full of Amazon affiliate links. I understand that other people have more benign impressions of this, but to me it is incredibly dubious and puts the whole venture under a huge question mark -- was the "review" motivated by pitching affiliate links? Were the items selected based upon their availability on Amazon? Were the higher commission items favored? And so on. There is simply zero legitimacy left when you use affiliate links. Similarly, if you "review" a book and pitch it through affiliate links, I no longer know whether it's even worth my time (most technical books simply are not), or whether your impression of it, and encouragement of its purchase, was motivated by commission links. Probably the least offputting, brand-ruining tactic is the Daring Fireball technique of periodically putting some shout out to a sponsor and encouragement of their product. I suspect it is far more rewarding both to him and his sponsors, and limits the sliminess to a single occasional post, versus selling one's credibility. ITT - people pitching affiliate links and crapware on their tiny blogs talk up how great it is.
  - Encosia 12y ago
    I think you're too suspicious in the case of developers reviewing books. There's just no where near enough upside in Amazon affiliate money, compared to what people in our profession make normally, for anyone to ruin their credibility with bogus reviews to drive affiliate link traffic.
    - cobblestone 12y ago
      This argument is and has always been specious, yet it's always the fallback. If the income is so low and irrelevant, why are the links there in the first place. Why even put a question mark on it when it's just entirely unnecessary? I fairly prolifically blog, and I haven't put a single affiliate link in a post since it was a novelty in the mid-90s, because to do so takes advantage of readers and undermines credibility. And to your root claim, I'd say it's absolutely ridiculous. I've come across blogs reviewing and recommending books that they clearly had never read, at most skimming a short ways in. Most technical books are absolutely horrendous (I understand you cite yourself as an author, almost surely motivating your down arrow), so this completely short circuits the equation.
Ripsaw 12y ago
With the money that a programmer makes in the current market 150 a month is nothing more then beer money. The blog serves its purpose by acting as an advertisement for yourself, putting advertisements within an advertisement is a bit redundant. That one guy that gets turned away from the ads may be the guy willing to pay you made money.
edent 12y ago
I use Amazon affiliate links on my blog. If I'm reviewing a book, or piece of kit, I make the links point at Amazon's UK site with my tracking ID. If a user clicks on the link, and either buys the product or something else, I get ~6% of the purchase price. In a good quarter (100 - 200k views) I can make ~£150. Not "quit my job" money, but "offsets the hosting, and lets me buy toys" cash. Downsides are: - UK only. There's no (easy) way to send US traffic to the Amazon.com site. So all my international traffic isn't making me money. - Not all my blog posts talk about a product. So I can go months without any new "money making" content. - Can feel a bit scummy. I'm conscious that I'm writing a post not to impart information, but to entice people to click on links. - While AdBlock doesn't seem to interfere with the links, services like Ghostery do. Overall, I'd say that running a blog is cheap. You probably don't need advertising on it. You're not going to make retirement money unless you're literally getting millions of hits per day.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  > - While AdBlock doesn't seem to interfere with the links, services like Ghostery do. If you're using an ordinary link, it shouldn't; are you using some kind of magic JavaScript from Amazon or an affiliate handling service there?
  - edent 12y ago
    Just a regular HTML link to Amazon which includes `&tag=whatever` on it. Ghostery will throw up a warning if you've asked it to block affiliate links (and rightly so).
- slig 12y ago
  > There's no (easy) way to send US traffic to the Amazon.com site You can run a small snippet of JS that replaces all the links with amazon.co.uk to amazon.com. You have to figure out that the user is from the US (maybe reading the Accept-Language, don't know if that's reliable) // untested var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a'); for (i=0; i<links.length; i++){ var link = links[i]; if (link.href.match(/amazon.co.uk/)) link.href = link.href.replace('.co.uk', '.com') }
PaulHoule 12y ago
I think there was a Coding Horror piece years ago titled something like "We don't buy software here." There is a big segment of software developers who literally don't buy anything. Some of them use free software entirely, others use whatever software management bought. (For instance, I worked at a place that had a MSDN subscription so we had all the Microsoft tools we could have possibly wanted) If you picked a topic truly out of random out of the great encyclopedia of the situation, you would probably make something around $1-$2 per page view with Adsense. If you pick a topic because it is something you like (i.e. "programming", "blogging", "japanese aninmation", etc.) you join a group of other unfortunate people that are likely to be getting $0.10-0.20 per page view really because (i) there is too much of that content, (ii) the people interested in that content don't spend money.
- wolfgke 12y ago
  > If you pick a topic because it is something you like (i.e. "programming", "blogging", "japanese aninmation", etc.) you join a group of other unfortunate people that are likely to be getting $0.10-0.20 per page view $0.10-0.20 per page view is a number that one can only dream of. You probably rather mean $0.10-0.20 per 1000 page views.
winry 12y ago
Hold on, what happened to Coding Horror's traffic?
- cobblestone 12y ago
  People have generally stopped visiting blogs. Even stand-alone web sites are starting to suffer. I recently re-enabled my Facebook account for dev purposes, and while there liked the Verge, AnandTech, etc. So now my feed is a small amount of family stuff, and a long list of tech news, most of which I quickly scroll past. It's interesting because I essentially never visit those sites any more. Not long ago I visited the Verge probably daily, and browsed into random stories. I visited Anandtech weekly. And so on. Now I see the headlines that I skip past, and that's that. And on the pure blog front, a lot of people rely upon sites like HN and reddit to sift through the chaff, the idea being that those killer blog posts will rise to the top. We know that isn't actually true (HN is mostly about luck and pet topics, with a lot of terrible content rising, while Reddit is horribly, horribly gamed), but the end result is that the good content suffers.
  - billyhoffman 12y ago
    Have people "generally stopped visiting blogs?" Do "a lot" of people rely on HN? Internet usage is 39% globally [1]. I doubt there are any statements you can make that apply to 2.85 Billion People. Feels like you are ascribing your personal opinion/beliefs/experiences to "people" in general. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
    - engendered 12y ago
      Is this an example of someone adding an irrelevant citation to try to add an air of authority where they have none? Technology blogs used to be fairly significant ventures. Now there are shockingly few that are still maintained, and even those (such as Coding Horror) detail dramatic declines in readership. Every reality goes against your garbage post. Yet still you did it. Weird. HN gets stupider by the day. [1] - http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-cook-spaghetti-squash-in-the-oven-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-178036 http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-cook-spaghetti-squash-in-the...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
minimaxir 12y ago
> For one thing, the 143k hits over a 30-day period seems like a fluke. For reference, a single post that goes viral on Reddit gets about 100k page views, while a single post that goes viral on Hacker News gets about 10k pageviews (both speaking from experience). It's not worth the hassle of managing ads, at the least. If you're a developer, your income is probably sufficient enough to not warrant the supplemental money from ads. :P
mparramon 12y ago
Another reference: I'm getting about $30/month for 60K pageviews/month to www.developingandstuff.com – definitely not serious cash, just a nice incentive.
AndrewOMartin 12y ago
Signing up to an ad exchange is not the only way to run ads. I think Penny Arcade was a good example, though they're currently not ad supported. They used to have a small number of banner ads on rotation that were curated by the authors to be unintrusive and for products they happily endorsed. I often clicked on these ads as they represented good-reviews by implication. It may be simple enough to reserve a rectangle on your site with some text along the lines of "advertise here, x views a month on average, specialised crowd, $y per month", then you could sort it out directly with a product vendor of your choice. If life's not that simple then someone on here should set up a middleman business that would be a specialised ad exchange for linking products (small, and specialised, lowe marketing spend) with blogs (small and specialised, expert readers, blog owner must approve of the product and ad).
- minimaxir 12y ago
  > I think Penny Arcade was a good example, though they're currently not ad supported. More information behind this: Penny Arcade ran a Kickstarter to remove ads on their site which was incredibly successful (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pennyarcade/penny-arcade-sells-out https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pennyarcade/penny-arcad...) This method wouldn't work for normal developers because a) Penny Arcade has a massive fanbase and b) Penny Arcade makes most of their money off of merchandise. Although, would a Patreon for a developer work? It would be a hard sell, though.
  - AndrewOMartin 12y ago
    This is all true, and another interesting alternative to signing up to an ad exchange. I specifically used past tense as their current setup is inapplicable to the blog in the article, though I'd be interested if anyone could reference other sites that are currently using PA's previous approach.
logfromblammo 12y ago
I doubt that the same sort of ads that run elsewhere on the web would work on a software-related blog. The blogger would probably have to do paid placement within the text of the posts, containing clickable links. If the ad does not get blocked, and I even notice it when I am scanning the text, I'm likely to just hit the back button and try the next search result. I'm not intentionally trying to make things more difficult on the people running the blogs, but I am far more likely to remember a trademark if the blogger mentions it as a useful tool for a particular task than if an ad for it serves on a page about something else. A manufacturer-paid or affiliate-monetized critical review sways me far more than an attached ad image--even if it was not an entirely positive review. Besides that, writing a review is content that you control. If you rely on ad-serving networks, you can't be certain ahead of time what they will be serving from your page, or what you will be paid.
nsgi 12y ago
> What advertisers are interested in an audience that’s mostly programmers with an interest in low-level shenanigans? Employers?
- AndrewOMartin 12y ago
  People who produce goods and services for low-level programming shenanigans.
hyperpape 12y ago
For all the people who mention running adblock, and hate ads on aesthetic grounds, visit his site from a browser not running adblock. The ads displaying in the right hand side are relatively unobtrusive and inoffensive. (Now, if you're concerned about privacy or performance, keep adblock on).
sandycheeks 12y ago
I have tried for two years to monetize my programming blog without making $100 in that entire time while I make a nice living from ads on my other sites. I save RAW hard drives via a post I wrote 2 years ago. It's not really a programming post on my programming blog but like forums, you have little control over the demographic that ends up flocking to your blog. Especially if it is eclectic like mine. There are thousands of visitors daily to the post and I get emails and try to answer comments everyday. Ads, affiliate links, Amazon, eBay, Adsense, BSA, direct ads, CPA, CPM, nothing works on my programming blog with thousands of visitors each day. Extensive a/b testing is inconclusive due to lack of actions. So now I only have a bitcoin address in that particular post and hope one day to get something from that :) Ads do not work for all niches on the internet. Unless, of course, you want to deceive your users and trick them into clicking on something that is not what they think it is. That always works, for awhile at least. In the meantime, I'll keep helping the people who end up there for free as best I can because in the end, that is in line with what I have hoped the internet would be.
filearts 12y ago
There is an interesting side discussion as to transparency of ad exchanges. I run a site with significant traffic that is supported by ads served by an ad exchange. I can track the number of views and the number of clicks and thereby audit the exchange's numbers. What I can't do, is ever know if I'm getting a fair share of the underlying ad revenue since there is no published formula to translate hits/clicks/CPM to dollars. What is your experience with this and how have you come to trust or distrust your ad exchanges?
nicholas73 12y ago
I agree that certain demographics are most likely to click than others. I myself rarely click on ads, and estimated that click through rates must be very low (1/1000). Yet, my sudoku game site routinely has CTR of 2-5%. No ad tricks, just a large and obvious ad. I can only imagine what CTR tricky ads get. http://sudokuisland.com http://sudokuisland.com

99 points by luu 12y ago

No. There are two main points for a programming blog - to keep your own notes in one place, and to try and raise your profile / build an audience to make the next contract or pay review a much happier experience. Neither of those are helped by ads, and the latter is probably negatively impacted. You have really impressive views afaik - which is why someone probably called you. But even so, you are thinking a rough likely income of 140usd a month. It's really hard to put the logical business case, but being the guy in the department who gets 100K views on his blog is easily worth 1700 usd at the annual pay review (read patio11 post on this subject). If you are a contractor or can build a network from the blog that 1700 pa is going to get wiped out in one deal. Stick a mailchimp form on your blog and keep writing interesting stuff.

bemmu 12y ago
Agreed. I suppose even Jeff Atwood's blog ultimately had the most impact when he used it to drive the initial traffic to StackOverflow.
semperfaux 12y ago
There are two main points for a programming blog - to keep your own notes in one place, and to try and raise your profile / build an audience to make the next contract or pay review a much happier experience. If one subscribes to your extremely limited view of what a "programming blog" should be or aspire to be, and what its author(s)' goals are or should be, then maybe this is reasonable. But I don't find that at all convincing. If you are a contractor or can build a network from the blog that 1700 pa is going to get wiped out in one deal. No... it'll still be there. And it'll be there if you have a bad month -- or year -- and you end up depending more than you'd want on that otherwise paltry sum. I'm not saying this is without merit. I'm just saying it's incredibly short-sighted. I like to look at the big picture as well, but to suggest that money you might bring in with minimal impact is necessarily useless in the face of the potential to bring in more money in other (largely or totally unrelated) ways strikes me as seriously out of touch with the lows reality can drop on your doorstep. Stick a mailchimp form on your blog and keep writing interesting stuff. This is at least much more reasonable than making blanket statements that start with "No."
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  Well the No was a direct answer to a direct question. :-) And I think that putting ads onto an otherwise nice and coherent personal site sends out all the wrong signals (it makes us judge this not as a personal site but as a commercial entity - which demands higher production standards (and oddly lowers the trustworthiness of his opinions on Intel die layouts etc). The small amount of advertising income is unlikely to ever pay for that trust loss - and if the OP is ever likely to find that income vital then they should fight for a pay rise today. I am negative on the value of broadcast style advertising - I would say that going for advertising dollars when you don't think they will pay for the young graduate you really ought to be hiring to do ad sales by phone is a bad idea. I really cannot see advertising being democratised by giving tiny slices to smaller and smaller outlets. Maybe affiliation sales will work at those levels but probably not.

Raphmedia 12y ago

This is very, very interesting. Thanks for the detailed informations! To be, ad monetization is a big black box. It's very helpful to have "insider" information.

AbhishekBiswal 12y ago

Then there's AdBlock, of which most of the people reading the blog might be aware of. The web looks weird with all the advertisements when I'm not on my own machine.

oatmale 12y ago
Let's be honest here, you didn't read the article.

ttty 12y ago

If you want to be evil do like these guys and freeze who has adblock, but I sincerely hope you don't do that (not everything is about money!): http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2to4pm/what_evil_bloggers_do_to_adblock_make_it_hang_by/ http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2to4pm/what_evil_blo...

jaxbot 12y ago

I tried running ads once, made about a penny in a month. Turned off the ads, cleaned up the site, focused on posting my notes/work, and ended up getting recruited through some engineers finding my posts when searching for info. To me, that was way more worth it than any ad revenue, but of course, your mileage may vary.

tomphoolery 12y ago

"Worse yet, this is getting worse over time. CPM is down something like 5x since the 90s, and continues to decline. Meanwhile, the percentage of people using ad blockers continues to increase." I hope that someday, the trend described above becomes so pronounced that it means the death of the ad-supported Internet. Perhaps there is a way to make good money on the web without resorting to such slimy tactics.

Ripsaw 12y ago
Like what? Make people pay for content? The internet costs money to maintain and I'm sorry to say but much of the convenience we enjoy is provided only because we look at a thousand+ ads a day. Do you really want to pay $5 a month for every site you want to read?
- jlarocco 12y ago
  Meh. At one point, I'd have said, "Yes, I would prefer that." And I think in the long run we'd be better off. People love pointing out how much of the internet is available because of ads, but they don't point out how much of it is shitty and difficult to use because of ads. I can do without clicking through 5 pages of useless blog spam looking for a real article, and stories with seven paragraphs split up over 14 pages for ad purposes. Those are business models that deserve to die, IMO. I think a big chunk of the internet knows that going ad-free would mean they'd go from making small amounts of money off of ad clicking suckers, to making no money from anybody. But, that said, adblocking software is so good lately, I don't mind keeping the current setup. I'm not paying, and I'm not seeing the ads, so I get the best of both worlds.

toddynho 12y ago

Nice post! I wrote an answer on Quora for "How much do content producers who are apart of "The Deck" ad network make monthly?" which also gets into some additional details: http://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-apart-of-The-Deck-ad-network-make-monthly/answer/Todd-Garland http://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-a... (disclosure: I'm the Founder of BuySellAds who owns Carbon Ads) FWIW, when it comes to privacy, BuySellAds (and by extension Carbon Ads) is probably one of the few companies who don't actually do anything we don't tell you about with users' browsing data. We use it for forecasting what's available to be sold - that's it. We also wrote a handy tutorial that will help folks determine what % of visitors are using AdBlock: http://support.buysellads.com/knowledge_base/topics/how-to-figure-out-what-percentage-of-your-visitors-are-using-an-ad-blocker http://support.buysellads.com/knowledge_base/topics/how-to-f...

Encosia 12y ago
Keep in mind that a lot of ad blockers are blocking third-party analytics too these days, so measuring an AdBlock ratio by pushing events into GA isn't going to be very accurate. I display a gentle plea to whitelist my site (http://encosia.com/blog/wp-content/themes/encosia/carbon-alert.html http://encosia.com/blog/wp-content/themes/encosia/carbon-ale...) if the Carbon div isn't in the DOM after a little bit. I'm displaying that by loading an HTML fragment via AJAX, so I can grep my server-side logs and see how often that's loaded. I haven't checked lately, but the ratio was huge the last time I did look.
- username223 12y ago
  Whitelisting you would also allow AddThis, Clicky, GA, G+, and Adobe. The "gentle plea" just makes your blog (or whatever it is) look annoying and desperate.
  - Encosia 12y ago
    That's not very nice. Surely you wouldn't look a real person you barely know in the eyes and call them annoying and desperate for something that trivial. Regardless, I was hesitant to add the nag, but I've only received positive feedback, e.g.: https://twitter.com/TweetsOfSumit/status/534623233920598017 https://twitter.com/TweetsOfSumit/status/534623233920598017 https://twitter.com/DanTheOther/status/550807053812252673 https://twitter.com/DanTheOther/status/550807053812252673 But, thanks for your opinion. It's interesting to hear what people think about it.

corin_ 12y ago

> Premium ads can get well over an order of magnitude higher CPM, so the picture might not be quite as bleak as I’m making it out to be. But to get premium ads you need to appeal to specific advertisers. What advertisers are interested in an audience that’s mostly programmers with an interest in low-level shenanigans? I've no experience marketing anything aimed at this audience, so have no idea what suitable companies think about this, nor what CPMs or CPAs they'd be used to seeing in their ad spends. But as a rule of thumb, targeted means more interesting to advertisers who want to hit that audience. For example if a VPS company wanted to advertise, where better than on a popular programmer's blog? (Again I have no idea on what margins or target CPAs a VPS company would have, so just a random example.) Of course, a targeted audience that doesn't interest any advertisers can have the opposite effect and drive your CPMs down, but more often than not it will help. It's just a question of will it help enough to justify the time getting the right advertisers to part with their money to advertise with you. (I also have no experience either selling or buying adverts for personal blogs, but the above rule of thumb is pretty scalable.) edit: Got distracted before finishing reading, and will now add my thoughts to his last paragraph: > There’s the argument that ad blocking is piracy and/or stealing, but I’ve never heard a convincing case made. If anything, I think that some of the people who make that argument step over the line, as when ars technica blocked people who used ad blockers, and then backed off and merely exhorted people to disable ad blocking for their site. I think most people would agree that directly exhorting people to click on ads and commit click fraud is unethical; asking people to disable ad blocking is a difference in degree, not in kind. People who use ad blockers are much less likely to click on ads, so having them disable ad blockers to generate impressions that are unlikely to convert strikes me as pretty similar to having people who aren’t interested in the product generate clicks. I make most of my living from people seeing digital adverts and I'd never argue its piracy or stealing. So I'm with the author on that one. As to preventing people from reading your website if they don't disable adblockers - I think it's a shitty thing to do, it's not something I'd ever be willing to suggest anyone does, but at the same time I don't see why a website shouldn't at least be allowed to do it. If a site does it and you don't like it then stop visiting. Personally I like sites that show "You're using an adblocker - you can keep using it if you like, but we'd really appreciate if you didn't". The reason for this is I disagree with the premise that those who use adblock won't click adverts. The number one reason for people using adblock is that too many advertisers/publishers allow shitty adverts. Adverts that pop out of the window. Or cover up content. Or use too much bandwidth or memory. Etc. If you're not one of those publishers, and you don't allow those kinds of advertisers on your site, then there's plenty of people who use adblock but might consider clicking on one or more of your adverts if they could be persuaded to view them. I'm not talking about asking them to click adverts, just that if they see them they might actually want to click on them. I don't have data to back this up, but have a couple of people I'm going to talk to and hopefully see if I can get numbers to demonstrate this, as I'm confident its the case. Alternatively if anyone reading this has a decent-sized audience (preferably with a high pageview to unique ratio - i.e. more loyal visitors rather than just visitors driven by search enginges) and would be interested in testing, feel free to get in touch to chuck about a couple of ideas. I couldn't really help on the execution side, but would happy to give advice on how to test if you'd be willing to share numbers with me afterwards. (The basic idea would be to see what % of people respond to polite requests to disable adblock, and how click rates are affected. If you have the technical chops to do more then could go further and either attempt to anonymously identify which clicks came from a previous adblock user, and also look at actual conversion rates rather than just click rates if your advertisers allow you access to this data.)

pherocity_ 12y ago

I block ads because advertisers/networks don't respect the do not track flag. I don't want to block ads, but I value my right to privacy more than I value your right to monetize my eyeballs. If the ad companies played in good faith, then I wouldn't have to circumvent them.

freddealmeida 12y ago

I would suggest you hyper target your site with key advertisers that can support content. For example, MS for Azure content. They can provide readers with real value. But requires you figure out how they can make it worth it for your audience.

IgorPartola 12y ago

I have a sneaking suspicion that certain groups of people are just much less susceptible to ads. I never click on ads. I mean, literally never. If you run an ad monetized site, I am the moocher who never makes you any money. If I search Google for something, and the result comes up as both an ad and a non-ad, I click on the non-ad link. If it only comes up as an ad, I keep searching. With me it's almost irrational, stemming from when long commercial breaks would interrupt cartoons and movies I watched. Ironically, I am building a mobile app that's going to be ad monetized (well, at least the free version will be). I suppose that makes me hypocrite. At the same time, I think I'm not alone. There's just something dreadful about having your decision making so directly influenced. It's sort of a "why are you trying to push this thing on me? Is it not good enough to stand on its own merit?" I believe that when I need something, I will find it and do my own research. This is why I also never put much value in Facebook. Who clicks on those ads? Aren't you just there to socialize? Edit: I should say that I am aware enough to realize that there are much more subtle form of marketing that definitely do influence me. If a person I respect gives something a good review, for example, I will be more likely to buy it. If a company has a good story to tell about themselves, that makes me think highly of them. If it's a product I've seen on Shark Tank I'm more likely to consider it because I'm more familiar with what they do. Ads are just too obvious about it for me.

AtmaScout 12y ago
I'll click the ad if it is for a company I don't like and have to use. For example, particular ISPs.
orng 12y ago
Yes, I am the same. I never, ever click on ads. If an ad happens to interest me (this happens extremely rarely) I google the product rather than clicking on the ad. For me however, I don't think it has anything to do with me not wanting to be influenced by ads and everything to do with the legacy of shady internet ads. Growing up you learned that clicking ads on the internet will get your computer infected or similar so you learned that all ads were shady and to stay away from them. Although I today know this is not always the case, the imprint remains.
12y ago

IgorPartola 12y ago

mdemare 12y ago

How about using affiliate links for products that are relevant to your audience? E.g. books about programming, hardware, etc...

cobblestone 12y ago
These are the worst. Marco Arment periodically does reviews of various things (coffee makers, headphones, etc), and he absolutely packs them full of Amazon affiliate links. I understand that other people have more benign impressions of this, but to me it is incredibly dubious and puts the whole venture under a huge question mark -- was the "review" motivated by pitching affiliate links? Were the items selected based upon their availability on Amazon? Were the higher commission items favored? And so on. There is simply zero legitimacy left when you use affiliate links. Similarly, if you "review" a book and pitch it through affiliate links, I no longer know whether it's even worth my time (most technical books simply are not), or whether your impression of it, and encouragement of its purchase, was motivated by commission links. Probably the least offputting, brand-ruining tactic is the Daring Fireball technique of periodically putting some shout out to a sponsor and encouragement of their product. I suspect it is far more rewarding both to him and his sponsors, and limits the sliminess to a single occasional post, versus selling one's credibility. ITT - people pitching affiliate links and crapware on their tiny blogs talk up how great it is.
- Encosia 12y ago
  I think you're too suspicious in the case of developers reviewing books. There's just no where near enough upside in Amazon affiliate money, compared to what people in our profession make normally, for anyone to ruin their credibility with bogus reviews to drive affiliate link traffic.
  - cobblestone 12y ago
    This argument is and has always been specious, yet it's always the fallback. If the income is so low and irrelevant, why are the links there in the first place. Why even put a question mark on it when it's just entirely unnecessary? I fairly prolifically blog, and I haven't put a single affiliate link in a post since it was a novelty in the mid-90s, because to do so takes advantage of readers and undermines credibility. And to your root claim, I'd say it's absolutely ridiculous. I've come across blogs reviewing and recommending books that they clearly had never read, at most skimming a short ways in. Most technical books are absolutely horrendous (I understand you cite yourself as an author, almost surely motivating your down arrow), so this completely short circuits the equation.

Ripsaw 12y ago

With the money that a programmer makes in the current market 150 a month is nothing more then beer money. The blog serves its purpose by acting as an advertisement for yourself, putting advertisements within an advertisement is a bit redundant. That one guy that gets turned away from the ads may be the guy willing to pay you made money.

edent 12y ago

I use Amazon affiliate links on my blog. If I'm reviewing a book, or piece of kit, I make the links point at Amazon's UK site with my tracking ID. If a user clicks on the link, and either buys the product or something else, I get ~6% of the purchase price. In a good quarter (100 - 200k views) I can make ~£150. Not "quit my job" money, but "offsets the hosting, and lets me buy toys" cash. Downsides are: - UK only. There's no (easy) way to send US traffic to the Amazon.com site. So all my international traffic isn't making me money. - Not all my blog posts talk about a product. So I can go months without any new "money making" content. - Can feel a bit scummy. I'm conscious that I'm writing a post not to impart information, but to entice people to click on links. - While AdBlock doesn't seem to interfere with the links, services like Ghostery do. Overall, I'd say that running a blog is cheap. You probably don't need advertising on it. You're not going to make retirement money unless you're literally getting millions of hits per day.

JoshTriplett 12y ago
> - While AdBlock doesn't seem to interfere with the links, services like Ghostery do. If you're using an ordinary link, it shouldn't; are you using some kind of magic JavaScript from Amazon or an affiliate handling service there?
- edent 12y ago
  Just a regular HTML link to Amazon which includes `&tag=whatever` on it. Ghostery will throw up a warning if you've asked it to block affiliate links (and rightly so).
slig 12y ago
> There's no (easy) way to send US traffic to the Amazon.com site You can run a small snippet of JS that replaces all the links with amazon.co.uk to amazon.com. You have to figure out that the user is from the US (maybe reading the Accept-Language, don't know if that's reliable) // untested var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a'); for (i=0; i<links.length; i++){ var link = links[i]; if (link.href.match(/amazon.co.uk/)) link.href = link.href.replace('.co.uk', '.com') }

PaulHoule 12y ago

I think there was a Coding Horror piece years ago titled something like "We don't buy software here." There is a big segment of software developers who literally don't buy anything. Some of them use free software entirely, others use whatever software management bought. (For instance, I worked at a place that had a MSDN subscription so we had all the Microsoft tools we could have possibly wanted) If you picked a topic truly out of random out of the great encyclopedia of the situation, you would probably make something around $1-$2 per page view with Adsense. If you pick a topic because it is something you like (i.e. "programming", "blogging", "japanese aninmation", etc.) you join a group of other unfortunate people that are likely to be getting $0.10-0.20 per page view really because (i) there is too much of that content, (ii) the people interested in that content don't spend money.

wolfgke 12y ago
> If you pick a topic because it is something you like (i.e. "programming", "blogging", "japanese aninmation", etc.) you join a group of other unfortunate people that are likely to be getting $0.10-0.20 per page view $0.10-0.20 per page view is a number that one can only dream of. You probably rather mean $0.10-0.20 per 1000 page views.

winry 12y ago

Hold on, what happened to Coding Horror's traffic?

cobblestone 12y ago
People have generally stopped visiting blogs. Even stand-alone web sites are starting to suffer. I recently re-enabled my Facebook account for dev purposes, and while there liked the Verge, AnandTech, etc. So now my feed is a small amount of family stuff, and a long list of tech news, most of which I quickly scroll past. It's interesting because I essentially never visit those sites any more. Not long ago I visited the Verge probably daily, and browsed into random stories. I visited Anandtech weekly. And so on. Now I see the headlines that I skip past, and that's that. And on the pure blog front, a lot of people rely upon sites like HN and reddit to sift through the chaff, the idea being that those killer blog posts will rise to the top. We know that isn't actually true (HN is mostly about luck and pet topics, with a lot of terrible content rising, while Reddit is horribly, horribly gamed), but the end result is that the good content suffers.
- billyhoffman 12y ago
  Have people "generally stopped visiting blogs?" Do "a lot" of people rely on HN? Internet usage is 39% globally [1]. I doubt there are any statements you can make that apply to 2.85 Billion People. Feels like you are ascribing your personal opinion/beliefs/experiences to "people" in general. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
  - engendered 12y ago
    Is this an example of someone adding an irrelevant citation to try to add an air of authority where they have none? Technology blogs used to be fairly significant ventures. Now there are shockingly few that are still maintained, and even those (such as Coding Horror) detail dramatic declines in readership. Every reality goes against your garbage post. Yet still you did it. Weird. HN gets stupider by the day. [1] - http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-cook-spaghetti-squash-in-the-oven-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-178036 http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-cook-spaghetti-squash-in-the...

deleted 12y ago

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minimaxir 12y ago

> For one thing, the 143k hits over a 30-day period seems like a fluke. For reference, a single post that goes viral on Reddit gets about 100k page views, while a single post that goes viral on Hacker News gets about 10k pageviews (both speaking from experience). It's not worth the hassle of managing ads, at the least. If you're a developer, your income is probably sufficient enough to not warrant the supplemental money from ads. :P

mparramon 12y ago

Another reference: I'm getting about $30/month for 60K pageviews/month to www.developingandstuff.com – definitely not serious cash, just a nice incentive.

AndrewOMartin 12y ago

Signing up to an ad exchange is not the only way to run ads. I think Penny Arcade was a good example, though they're currently not ad supported. They used to have a small number of banner ads on rotation that were curated by the authors to be unintrusive and for products they happily endorsed. I often clicked on these ads as they represented good-reviews by implication. It may be simple enough to reserve a rectangle on your site with some text along the lines of "advertise here, x views a month on average, specialised crowd, $y per month", then you could sort it out directly with a product vendor of your choice. If life's not that simple then someone on here should set up a middleman business that would be a specialised ad exchange for linking products (small, and specialised, lowe marketing spend) with blogs (small and specialised, expert readers, blog owner must approve of the product and ad).

minimaxir 12y ago
> I think Penny Arcade was a good example, though they're currently not ad supported. More information behind this: Penny Arcade ran a Kickstarter to remove ads on their site which was incredibly successful (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pennyarcade/penny-arcade-sells-out https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pennyarcade/penny-arcad...) This method wouldn't work for normal developers because a) Penny Arcade has a massive fanbase and b) Penny Arcade makes most of their money off of merchandise. Although, would a Patreon for a developer work? It would be a hard sell, though.
- AndrewOMartin 12y ago
  This is all true, and another interesting alternative to signing up to an ad exchange. I specifically used past tense as their current setup is inapplicable to the blog in the article, though I'd be interested if anyone could reference other sites that are currently using PA's previous approach.

logfromblammo 12y ago

I doubt that the same sort of ads that run elsewhere on the web would work on a software-related blog. The blogger would probably have to do paid placement within the text of the posts, containing clickable links. If the ad does not get blocked, and I even notice it when I am scanning the text, I'm likely to just hit the back button and try the next search result. I'm not intentionally trying to make things more difficult on the people running the blogs, but I am far more likely to remember a trademark if the blogger mentions it as a useful tool for a particular task than if an ad for it serves on a page about something else. A manufacturer-paid or affiliate-monetized critical review sways me far more than an attached ad image--even if it was not an entirely positive review. Besides that, writing a review is content that you control. If you rely on ad-serving networks, you can't be certain ahead of time what they will be serving from your page, or what you will be paid.

nsgi 12y ago

> What advertisers are interested in an audience that’s mostly programmers with an interest in low-level shenanigans? Employers?

AndrewOMartin 12y ago
People who produce goods and services for low-level programming shenanigans.

hyperpape 12y ago

For all the people who mention running adblock, and hate ads on aesthetic grounds, visit his site from a browser not running adblock. The ads displaying in the right hand side are relatively unobtrusive and inoffensive. (Now, if you're concerned about privacy or performance, keep adblock on).

sandycheeks 12y ago

I have tried for two years to monetize my programming blog without making $100 in that entire time while I make a nice living from ads on my other sites. I save RAW hard drives via a post I wrote 2 years ago. It's not really a programming post on my programming blog but like forums, you have little control over the demographic that ends up flocking to your blog. Especially if it is eclectic like mine. There are thousands of visitors daily to the post and I get emails and try to answer comments everyday. Ads, affiliate links, Amazon, eBay, Adsense, BSA, direct ads, CPA, CPM, nothing works on my programming blog with thousands of visitors each day. Extensive a/b testing is inconclusive due to lack of actions. So now I only have a bitcoin address in that particular post and hope one day to get something from that :) Ads do not work for all niches on the internet. Unless, of course, you want to deceive your users and trick them into clicking on something that is not what they think it is. That always works, for awhile at least. In the meantime, I'll keep helping the people who end up there for free as best I can because in the end, that is in line with what I have hoped the internet would be.

filearts 12y ago

There is an interesting side discussion as to transparency of ad exchanges. I run a site with significant traffic that is supported by ads served by an ad exchange. I can track the number of views and the number of clicks and thereby audit the exchange's numbers. What I can't do, is ever know if I'm getting a fair share of the underlying ad revenue since there is no published formula to translate hits/clicks/CPM to dollars. What is your experience with this and how have you come to trust or distrust your ad exchanges?

nicholas73 12y ago

I agree that certain demographics are most likely to click than others. I myself rarely click on ads, and estimated that click through rates must be very low (1/1000). Yet, my sudoku game site routinely has CTR of 2-5%. No ad tricks, just a large and obvious ad. I can only imagine what CTR tricky ads get. http://sudokuisland.com http://sudokuisland.com