I ran across this interesting thread on Digital Point where SERPalert was attempting to buy a month’s worth of advertising in the signatures of users with more than 1,000 posts for $10. Interesting idea I hadn’t seen before.
Incidentally, SERPalert looks like a useful service regardless, so it’s gotten at least one additional eyeball out of it.
An article today by Bob Tedeschi talks about something we’ve all been speculating - the revenue sharing in Google Adsense. In the article, which I heard about at Problogger and JenSense, reveals that Google pays out about 78.5% of each dollar of revenue to publishers.
I was curious how he reached that figure so I emailed him and I he told me that he pulled the figures from Google’s 10-Q. Of $675M in revenues from the Google Network, they paid out 78.5%, or about $530M. Then he mentioned that the company emphasized that 78.5% is an average payback… so each publisher gets more or less than that. This is for advertisements across their network, which I assume doesn’t just include Adsense, and for some that revenue share can exceed 100% depending on their agreement. Also, some sites get a minimum payout so that can elevate that percentage number.
Also picked up by BlogHerald.
Site statistics and RSS subscriptions make up your street cred and reach on the Web. When advertisers visit your site and consider paying you to show an ad, they want to know how many unique visitors show up and how many people read your words daily.
Let’s say you only have 15 unique visitors a day… that’s fine, don’t be afraid of it. If a prospective advertiser likes your site (which is one of the main reasons why they’d advertise in the first place) the second step is finding out your readership. If it’s low, they put it on their radar and wait to come back later. If it’s high, they might contact you to find out your rates. If it’s hidden, they have no idea and they could potentially forget about you. The path of least resistance is the one they’ll take.
There is nothing bad about low readership - unless you make it an issue. Nothing is more embarassing than having a prospective advertiser contact you only to find out you only have 15 visitors so let them know early!
