Advertising on DU: An Experiment - Democratic Underground

Skinner ADMIN

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Wed May-24-06 12:49 PM
Original message

Advertising on DU: An Experiment

About a week and a half ago, we got a call out-of-the-blue from Google. I usually blow-off unsolicited sales calls, but seeing as this one was from one of the must successful Internet companies on the planet, I was curious to find out why in the heck they were calling me.

It turns out that they were calling to talk to us about the Google AdSense program. We had tried the program briefly back in 2003 and discontinued using it because the ads were very poorly targeted, and the disruption to the site wasn't worth the paltry amount of money the ads were making for us. The Google sales rep on the phone assured us that the program has improved dramatically since we tried it three years ago, and she encouraged us to give it a try again. She claimed that we can probably get a significantly higher return on the ads than we did three years ago.

The sales rep quoted a cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) that was surprisingly high. I must admit I am skeptical -- rates for Web advertising are notoriously low, and for discussion forum-based sites like ours they are usually well below average (somewhere in the neighborhood of one-tenth of the normal return for Web advertising). Still, the sales rep was sufficiently optimistic about our prospects that we feel it would be irresponsible if we did not at least try running the ads.

To give you some idea of what we're talking about here: If Google's best-case estimates turn out to be true, then we would never have to do another fundraiser on Democratic Underground. But if their low-end estimates turn out to be true, the ads would barely cover the rent on our office, and probably would not be worth the added annoyance to our visitors.

The only way for us to know for sure what kind of return we can get is to give it a try.

Over the next few weeks, we want to test out a number of different ad placements all over the Democratic Underground website to see what (if anything) works and what does not. It is very likely that the ads might seem annoying at first to some of you -- as is the case with any change we do around here -- and so we want to thank you in advance for your patience. I hope you understand that our intent is not to annoy. Our hope is that by experimentation we can find a happy medium where we can get a decent return for the ads, without overly antagonizing all of you, our visitors. Please understand that if we want this to work, the advertisements will have to be placed in fairly prominent areas of our site where people will see them; while you might prefer it if we clustered all the ads at the bottom of our pages, it would be pretty pointless from a fundraising perspective.

The DU Admins are well aware that people don't like seeing ads when they go to a website, and I'm sure many of you are wondering why we are doing this at all. Our current system has worked pretty well so far, and the last thing on earth we want to do is to annoy the people who have been donating for the last five and a half years years to keep this website online. We are deeply grateful for their help.

But it is a fact that this community exists because of the generosity of a small minority of visitors to the site. We get hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month, but at any given time only a thousand people are actually contributing to keeping the site online. And it is worth noting that this is the only donor-funded organization I can think of that depends entirely on small donations. Since DU's launch in January 2001, we have received only two donations of a thousand dollars or more. We rarely receive a donation of more than one hundred dollars, and our average donation is about twenty dollars.

Now, we could try to squeeze all of you harder, but we really aren't comfortable doing that. Advertisements allow all of our visitors to help pay the bills. And if the ads are really successful, we might not need to raise quite as much money from voluntary donations -- and you all could donate your money to other worthy causes, like Democratic candidates or progressive non-profits.

But as I said, at this point we do not know if running ads will even make much of a difference to our bottom line. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we try these ads to find out if they will work for our community. Thank you so much.

Skinner, EarlG, Elad
DU Administrators