| tiny ghosts |
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Friday, July 13 2007 @ 04:43 AM BST (Read 16746 times) |
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Full Member
Status: offline
Registered: 04/17/07
Posts: 7
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Among a bunch of other things, I'm an author, and it would be great if I could use PW to get people to buy my book. But there's the results of a recent experiment.
I posted a bunch of $0 ads on a bunch of sites. Over the next two days:
Ad views: ~7000
Click throughs: 220
From my web site people can read a bit about the book and click through to Amazon to buy the book there:
Click throughs to Amazon: 2
Total Sales: 0
Now admitedly, it didn't cost me anything (but time). But I can't seem to figure out how ads can possibly help me sell books. If this was GoogleAds, each of those 220 hits would have costs me 5 cents ($11 bucks total!) since I make less than $2 in royalties per sale, is it even possible to make advertising work?
I've had similar experiences with my webcomics sites. There I'm not trying to sell anything, but I'm looking for eyeballs. If I post a bunch of ads I will get those eyeballs for a few days, but as soon as the ads expire I lose 100% of those readers. Absolutely none of them stick around. In fact, my webcomics audience is slowly getting smaller and smaller, despite my running of ads.
I suppose you could come to the conclusion that my products are just terrible, but if that's the case there isn't much I can do. But other people seem to make advertising work, but looking at the numebrs I get, I just can't see how it could possibly be worth the time and effort to place ads.
http://www.tinyghosts.com
http://www.foundcomics.net
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| Chris |
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Saturday, July 14 2007 @ 12:05 AM BST |
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Active Member
Status: offline
Registered: 05/27/07
Posts: 23
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I know nothing about webcomics, but if you run it for 7 months, have a base amount of visitors and it does not grow even a bit then something must be wrong with your site. Either content, updates or technical stuff (like site speed).
First I would fix the forum and put a contact page with your email. You need feedback from visitors. You need a hardcore fan base to make it run, and hardcore visitors need a place to talk (again, I never run webcomic, but I suspect it works similar way).
The second thing, the resolution. It does not fit in 1024x768, so if you were advertising on my site for example, you would lose 70% of the visitors at the very start
(browser screen resolution statistics: http://extremetracking.com/open;sys?login=lords123 )
The worrying thing is that your unique visitor count and page views is almost the same. It could mean that they check the site and close it without browsing (or that they check only to see the new strip and do nothing more). Also no refferer links, which means no links posted on any forums. You need to build a hardcore fanbase of your webcomic, then they will tell you what to change and will help you spread the word.
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| mskala |
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Sunday, July 15 2007 @ 03:18 PM BST |
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Active Member
 Status: offline
Registered: 01/10/07
Posts: 25
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I agree that advertising, both in general and PW in particular, seems to be disappointing. PW seems less disappointing than other schemes I've tried, which is why I'm continuing with it; but there's certainly no free lunch going around.
I have a book too - it's called Chessudoku. I get US$2.80 from each copy sold. In my history of trying to advertise it through PW, I've spent about $2.40, received about 300 clicks, and sold two copies (of which I can't be sure that either came from PW clickthroughs, because I don't host the sales page myself). I'd say that the free ads I was running, to which I attribute one of those sales, may have been worth it - but only because I was placing them with a script. They wouldn't have been worth my time to place the ads manually. The ad on Heracleum Sudoku, to which I attribute the other sale and which cost almost all of that $2.40, was not worth it. On that ad, I figure I didn't really break even given that cost of finding the site, designing the ad, and placing the bid. Really, even the free ads don't really to be worth it - I've not been keeping them up - because at the rate of one sale a month or so (which seems to be the maximum that PW advertising could bring me for free, which is what it would have to be to do better than break even), it's just not worth the time.
So how did eBay afford to pay Google's prices for the massive amount of advertising they were doing through Google ads on nonsense keywords? ("Best prices on eternal happiness!" ) I think one factor is that Google practices major price discrimination. A keyword on which it would cost you or me five cents per click (or five DOLLARS per click... right now Google is quoting me US$6 per click to advertise on "catgirl webcomic" even though I'm on the first page of the unpaid results) isn't necessarily costing the people who actually advertise there, anywhere near that much. I wouldn't be surprised if eBay was paying a penny or less for their nonsense ads. So the economics may not be quite as bad for them as for you and me. Another factor may be that impressions and clicks could be worth something even if they don't directly result in sales. I remember once telling a guy I'd just met that I had a Web comic called Bonobo Conspiracy, and he said he'd heard of it even though he'd never actually read it. It turned out he'd seen my non-PW ad on TA Vision, and never clicked on it because he'd assumed anything advertising there would be porn. That's valuable information two ways: one, getting my comic's name out there happens even when I don't actually get clicks, and two, TAV may or may not really be in keeping with the image I want to project. Similarly, eBay may benefit from getting you to think that eternal happiness is available for sale on their system in general, even if you don't click through to actually attempt to buy some today.
With a for-profit project, it makes sense to figure out how much a visitor is worth (including ideas like "they may come back and buy later even if they don't buy on this visit" and "merely seeing the ad even if they don't visit the site, is worth something in encouraging future sales" ) and then compare that to how much it costs to bring in the visitor. If you turn a profit on visitors after all the numbers are added up, then it makes sense to buy as many visitors at that price as you can find, because your profit only increases. But for something like the average Web comic, where you don't expect to turn a financial profit on visitors, things change a lot.
On my Web comic, I figure that visitors bringing in their friends is the only traffic-increasing measure that will really work in the long term, because it increases with increasing readership. Other things (my telling people to visit; my buying ads with my own money; etc.) stay the same or decrease with increasing readership, because my budget doesn't increase (and at high traffic I have to spend more of it on hosting). So at a high enough readership level, referrals will always end up being the majority of my new visitors. There is one exception: ads I buy with ad revenue. My ad revenue increases the more traffic I get (because my site becomes a more desirable place to advertise) so if I could pay for my ad purchases with ad revenue, I could get into the good situation, where more traffic means more money to bring in even more traffic. That doesn't seem like a realistic expectation, though, because in the new campaign-based PW world, the rate of ad revenue (CPM - how much money I make on ad sales per visitor) decreases with increasing traffic. Big sites receive less money per hit, so any site that relies on PW-purchased ads bought with PW revenue to bring in all its traffic will end up topping out at the point where it's paying a higher CPM than it's receiving. I think I'm already past that point.
It's disappointing that when I cut off my ad spending, my traffic drops almost to pre-ad levels - so, like you, I'm finding that the new readers I'm getting aren't repeat readers - but it doesn't drop all the way. I figure some percentage of readers who come in through PW ads do actually become regular repeat visitors, so there's still *some* value there. The hard part is deciding whether it's really enough value.
By the way: is there a way to disable the stupid smiley-face macros? Ever time I type a double quote followed by a closing parenthesis, it seems to want to turn it into a silly grin, as in ("Quotation in parentheses" Other systems have a check-box for disabling smiley faces, but all I can find to do here is insert a space before the closing parenthesis.
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| bookman31 |
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Saturday, August 21 2010 @ 04:36 PM BST |
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New Member
Status: offline
Registered: 08/21/10
Posts: 2
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With a self publishing a book project, it makes sense to figure out how much a visitor is worth (including ideas like "they may come back and buy later even if they don't buy on this visit" and "merely seeing the ad even if they don't visit the site, is worth something in encouraging future sales" ) and then self publishing compare that to how much it costs to bring in the visitor. If you turn a profit on visitors after all the numbers are added up, then it makes sense to buy as many visitors at that price as you can find, because your profit only increases. But for something like the average Web comic, where you don't expect to turn a financial profit on visitors, things change a lot.
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| Anonymous: vibram fivefingers trainers |
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Friday, September 03 2010 @ 04:47 AM BST |
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| sanyasan |
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Friday, September 03 2010 @ 10:31 AM BST |
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Active Member
Status: online
Registered: 09/03/10
Posts: 10
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I know nothing about webcomics, but if you run it for 7 months, have a base amount of visitors and it does not grow even a bit then something must be wrong with your site. Either content, updates or technical stuff (like site speed). UGG Bailey Button Triplet
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