The Death of Pageviews?
Posted on April 13, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized |
As I was reflecting on my web sites this morning on the treadmill, I came a conclusion about readership, RSS, and page views.
The page view is dying!
Why do I say that?
- I do not click through very often to blogs/sites that only offer a summary. I would probably at least scan the article were the whole thing available in my RSS reader. If something grabs me in the summary, it annoys me I have to go to an extra step of clicking to read it.
- On several of the blogs I publish full feeds, my subscribers and item use is very high. Many days higher then my page views. People are reading my posts, but not ending up at my web sites.
- This looks like it will be the first month I will make more money on commission sales then I do on advertisements I run.
We are rewarded based on serving our customers well. I serve my customers (readers) best by giving them the full feed.
But I am trying to make money, so what are the options? How can you make money off my (your) feed?
- You can go with an RSS advertising program. (Pheedo or FeedBurner), but whenever I see an ad served by them I think it looks odd, does not fit the content, and very rarely am I remotely tempted to click on the product or service advertised. Plus, many of these are pay per click options with very low payouts.
- Go with Feedvertising. If you are a word press person this is probably your best option. However, I think Word Press is a beast and I don’t have time to mess with getting all the plug ins installed and working with each other. This has always been a nightmare to me. Typepad is not quite as powerful, but the ease of use makes it the tool of choice for me. (Typepad has great customer service! Wordpress has user forums.) Feedvertising does maintain that other platforms are on the way. When it does, I will be first in line to check it out.
- Beg your readers to click through? Probably not going to work.
- Create custom feeds and figure out the coding of it all. Again, good luck. If you can pull it off, more power to you. This would be a very good option. I don’t have the time
None of these options appeal to me, so here is what I am going to try. As an experirment, I am going to publish the full feed on my blogs with a
commision opportunity in them. I will then track the results/click through
rates on the commision opportunites. They will look something like this…
This author buys all his domains through this weeks sponsor, Go Daddy.
I will also try simple text adds for commission opportunities.
The downside is that this will appear in all my post on my web page. The upside is that these opportunities can be much more lucrative then clicking on a Google ad.
I will let you know now my experiment goes.
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