A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I've been getting a few e-mails from guys interested in meeting me. On a similar note, I've also received a couple of e-mails asking me whether I'd be interested in carrying any adverts, or being sponsored by anyone. For the moment at least, I don't need the income, so I've declined the invitations.
I use www.statcounter.com to monitor visitors to this blog and where they come from. Given the adult nature of some of my postings, it's not surprising that many of the searches that find their way to this blog are indeed the result of adult-oriented searches. Which would pose an interesting dilemma should I ever decide to start carrying adverts.
When I interviewed GBD, I suggested that blogs which carry adverts look a bit cheap. In general I still think that's true, and I reckon that adverts of a more adult nature make a blog look even cheaper. The dilemma is that those would be exactly the adverts that would probably do very well on this blog!
In fact my number of daily visitors seems to be going up at the moment. January saw an average of 520 page loads a day from a daily average of 350 unique visitors, February was an average of 630 page loads daily from 450 unique visitors, but since the start of March there's been an average of 810 daily page loads from 580 unique visitors. I know that these figures are small in the big scheme of things, although one good thing is that there's reasonable consistency from one day to the next.
Since I don't intend to carry adverts, this whole subject is really of academic interest only, but I'd still quite like to know what this blog's revenue generation potential is for different types of adverts or sponsorship. Even though I don't need the income at the moment, if it is possible to generate any meaningful amount of money perhaps I should take adverts and donate the money to charity somehow? Anyway, if anyone out there can give me any insight into this subject I'd be very interested to hear what they have to say.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
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8 comments:
1) A coincidence you blogging about statcounter today - I was on the verge of asking your advice regards statcounter (I originally heard about the service via your blog). Ever since I upgraded to the new Blogger my stats have become very suspect. Anyway I girded my loins and fiddled about in the templates section - no idea what I did, but everything seems to be working now, even if the advertising industry won't be beating a path to my door anytime soon!
2) Congrats on your stats!
3) I agree you have a tough decision to make regards advertising. Clearly, you don't need the money, but more is always nice, no? ~ and you do expend a lot of time and energy writing a very entertaining blog, so I for one would be happy to see you earning from it.
I haven't tried anyone apart from www.statcounter.com Hedgie, but I have no qualms in recommending them. You get a log of 100 visitors for free, which allows you to test them out to see what they provide. A few months ago I decided that blogging was a sufficiently important hobby of mine, given that my readership was rising, so I decided to pay for a bigger log with them.
Also, perhaps I should clarify what I mean by a meaningful amount of money. Everyone's circumstances are different, but having worked as a banker at a competent level (rather than megastar level) for quite a few years now, I guess I'd define it as $1k/month. Even with adult adverts it seems likely to me that advertising or sponsorship income from my blog is likely to be much less than $0.1k/month. Given that one reader told me recently that it was nice to find a gay blog without adverts, I can't imagine me putting adverts on this blog even for charity.
GB xxx
Thanks! ~ I installed statcounter sometime after reading your original post about them, and all seemed fine until I upgraded to new Blogger. No hits at all registered after that. I thought I needed to reinstall, which I tried to do yesterday, but Blogger wouldn't let me. I tried 4 times, each time getting an error message - also checked out the support forums, and saw this had been a problem for others too.
However, later yesterday I saw statcounter registered hits again! So I checked back in my Blogger templates only to see statcounter was installed 4 times, despite all the error messages. Definitely more of a Blogger problem than a statcounter problem!
I agree a site without ads looks more classy - also some sites with lots of ads take forever to load which can be annoying.
i fucking hate ads on blogs
Donating your ad revenue to charity is a great idea and the charity is me. I need the revenue to live the same glam life as cutectguy.
Wow. I don't think I could ever get to that level. It just goes to show how much lives you touch...I'm neither here nor there with the adverts and in any case I think you do enough yeoman service with the 'Dear GB' letters. May you continue to grow - in all directions :P
oops, I ment the blog :-)
i really enjoy your blog and i would be disappointed to find ads on it, particularly knowing you didn't really need to generate the income ;-)
i screen the bulk of ads using adblock in firefox, which is really handy, but some still slip through.
the marketing industry will take any opportunity to flog a bit of space, and the 'pink pound' has been categorised and targeted to the point that sometimes i suspect the genericism of mainstream gay culture is something that to a large extent we're being willingly fed by the advertisers.
good quality free media is one of the blessings of the internet - please let's help to keep it that way...
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