DISQUS

Enter Venture: 6 Reasons to puts ads on your site that have nothing to do with revenue

  • Abhimanyu · 11 months ago
    Really strong and sensible reasoning. And the new design is good too. Gives a concise and compact feel (it's probably the squares). And I like the empty ad idea - I think it will actually make people wonder, "do I have anything that I can advertise in that space?".

    All the best!
  • Jonathan Wegener · 11 months ago
    Hey Patrick, excellent post.

    I especially like points #2 and #3 -- they're spot on. When I was running CULPA.info years back as a student, we had some heated arguments over whether to install ads and make money. I was passionately against it because I wanted CULPA to be entirely altruistic and not make money off the user's hard work (culpa is user generated content after all!)

    Finally, I agreed to let my culpa colleague install google adsense and I signed up far a commission junction account and amazon affiliate (to send students to buy used books through half.com and amazon marketplace). We kind of had a gentlemen's bet about which would bring in more money: affiliate links or google's text ads. Google won.

    Playing around with those products taught me so much about online advertising, marketing, and business in general. I learned all the terms you mentioned and more, and learned about the difficulties of sustaining a website through ads alone -- we made about $125/semester I think (which went into hosting fees and advertising the site on facebook). Anyway, I'm really grateful that I finally gave in to my insistent colleague and installed ads.
  • Patrick · 11 months ago
    Thanks. You ran CULPA? That's great. It helped me navigate Columbia for the first few years.

    I've found the same issue with Google vs. affiliate revenue. You'll at least see a trickle of revenue from Google, but the affiliate revenue might only come in bursts, if at all. For Wikinvest, I've been speaking to bloggers about advertising lately and most of them generally say the same. Of course, the best route to go is to sell your own ads, but that'll require me to post more than every week or so.
  • freestyle · 7 months ago
    Hey there, I find these 6 reasons really good, thanks a lot for posting them, I appreciate it.

    Emma