The Sorry Reality of Internet Ad Revenue For Publishers

Although my traffic is up to 2,300 visitors/day, you still can’t make money off that. I have no idea how much traffic you need to bring in before you can start making money off ads. Internet advertisers are disgusting pikers, and the offers they make (They dictate terms to you, not vice versa.) are so low it’s laughable. If you try to jack rates up to something reasonable, they say buzz off and pull the ads. Part of the problem is idiots like Craig Newmark of Craigslist, whose brilliant business model consists of giving his product away. He “sells” most of his ads for the incredibly low discount price of $0.00. When Craig yells, “We’re giving it away!” he’s actually serious. It’s hard to compete with a competitor who is selling product for zero dollars. You could always pay your customers to utilize your service or walk away with your product, but that doesn’t sound very profitable. How does Craig make money? He charges $10-25 for ads in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. Everything else is five finger discount. He makes enough off that to bring in $20 million/year, which he uses to employ a whole 20 employees. Yet his model has helped to knock back or take out how many daily newspapers and weekly newsmagazines? You can bitch about capitalism all you want, but we live in a capitalist society. If you’re pro-worker, you need to be pro-business to some extent. That is, businesses need to make a profit. When they lose money, all the workers get laid off, and unemployment is not pro-worker. Even when businesses take a hit, they lay off lots of workers and cut back wages and hours on the rest. That means lower incomes for workers, which is anti-worker. I wonder if this giving your product away stuff should even be legal. Should I be able to set up a stand outside the supermarket and give away free fruits and vegetables, just to be an anarchist and spread the love baby? I mean it feels groovy and all, but what about all those unionized checkers and boxers working inside the market? I’m going to give my product away! What kind of business model is that anyway? You can also get syndicated. Yes, I am syndicated. Not to badmouth my wonderful syndicator here, but I’m lucky that ain’t my only source of income. They act like they are doing me this wonderful favor by tossing some pennies my way every month. In a month, they usually pay me something like $20. That adds up to a yearly income of like $250 or so. You probably do way better collecting cans and dumpster diving for chow.

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12 thoughts on “The Sorry Reality of Internet Ad Revenue For Publishers”

  1. You tried contacting potential advertisers directly? People who have something to sell to the wide variety of us fringe lunatics and political extremists your site brings in – I dunno, maybe some kind of book publishing outfit or something?
    Anyway, I think we can all agree that dragging down the mass media is a good thing. How many columnists for major national publications are worth a shit? And it’s not like you’d be making the big bucks under pre-internet conditions anyway.

    1. No point contacting them directly. Generally, they contact you. That’s how it works in this business.
      I was on with Blogads on the old site, but I never even got one offer. I was pretty cheap too. It’s a real problem because even on Blogads there are all kinds of clowns who are practically giving their ads away. Actually, it’s a problem in the whole business. High traffic sites selling their ad space for a song.
      I don’t really mind taking down the horrible MSM. But what’s going to take its place? The MSM Internet. Which is…what? Better?
      Actually I am being somewhat lazy here. One problem is that it is very hard to figure out how to even place ads on this WordPress platform that I am on here. It’s much easier if you are hosting WordPress on your own host. WordPress is way harder than harder. I think I have to pay to even get access to the CSS.

  2. By the way, most of the big political rags (National Review, etc.) have always lost money. What they make in sales and advertising doesn’t cover the costs of paying the writers and staff and physically producing the magazines. They have wealthy sponsors who keep the ship afloat.

    1. Fact of the matter is that the poor and even the low income are for all intents and purposes not even on the Internet. Where I live, I am one of the only people who even has the Net. The others simply cannot afford it. For one thing, they can’t afford a computer for starters. For another, they can’t afford to get online even if they do. I even know low income Whites who are still on dial up. The Net is an elitist and White thing.

  3. I consider myself poor. My net worth is <0. The internet can be accessed by anyone with an IQ over 75 and with access to a public library.
    I have sold a couple things on craigslist and thankgoodness I was not charged for it. So craigslist helps the working class, people like me.
    I am also not one of those people who hates Walmart. I used to be and I understand it causes mom & pop businesses to go out of business. This hurts my heart, as I understand the owners do not have a lot of expendable money.
    However, Walmart helps many poor families, and to me this out weights the cost of some mom & pop businesses which must go out of business because they cannot sell stuff as cheaply.

    1. Fact of the matter is it does more harm than good. It takes out all the Mom and Pops, who were able to make a good middle class existence at their small businesses. They are out of work. Where can they work now? At the nonunionized Wal-Mart, for $8 an hour, just like everyone else in town. The good paying jobs are gone, and stuff is cheap. So what?
      I still think that the Net is somehow overpriced. There is no reason why the same people who have a TV ought not to have the Net too. The Net is indeed an elitist thing. I was looking over the demographics for some websites recently. One would not expect them to appeal to the rich. Yet 20-40% of their readers were making over $100,000 a year and almost all of those were Whites.
      If you are talking foreign countries, all you see is the elite on the Net. That’s why everyone on the Net from a foreign country is a right-winger. We have a long ways to go before we have democratized the Internet – a longstanding goal of mine.

  4. Cost of TV: $50 (used)- $3,000+
    Cost of cable: $30-75 (yes, many poor people in America have cable)
    Cost of basic computer: $250-400
    Internet: $30-60/month
    I am sure the rich are more likely to use the net in some other countries but it does not seem overpriced to me here. I suspect that the lower classes are usually for the most part more favorable to the brain-frying TV versus a more cognitively demanding net.
    If I am a welfare mom with 10 kids, and if I want to buy something, I can go to Walmart and save a few bucks, or spend more at a mom & pop. The fact is poor people do not want to spend more for a creative, original, place of business.

    1. For some reason, I think it’s just too much money. They almost all have TV, but hardly any have the Net. Even in the White town in the hills, a lot of people don’t have the Net and some are just getting their first computers too. I know people who are still on dialup up there. One problem is that there are monopolies for both cable and DSL that really artificially raise the prices of both of these things.

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