Michael Banks Valentine just emailed me that the Google AdSense Terms of Service forbid publishers carrying AdSense ads to reveal click throughs or revenue figures. So for you folks who’ve already sent me your data – never fear I won’t reveal it. (But I will check if I can run a survey to reveal some data in aggregate.)
Michael Mazel over at Google just sent me a link to this happy publisher carrying AdSense ads case history he wrote up. In it the folks at InfoPlease reveal they are making more with Google AdSense ads than they were as members of general online ad networks. https://www.google.com/adsense/infoplease
Which is fine… but you should realize general online ad networks have been paying diddlysquat for ages now, so anything is better than that.
I’ve been asking around about the profitability of AdSense ads and heard very different stories — ranging from under $1 CPM to $20CPM for publishers. I’ve also heard some folks say the ads are amazingly well targeted to their niche, and others say the opposite (such as an ad for healthcare pros that appeared on a kid’s site.)
So the jury is still out. I think we’re all hoping the kinks work out and this is a great program in the long run. In the meantime, email me your experiences! AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com
According to an article in Direct Magazine, subscription site Date.com has redirected 60% of its email marketing budget into other online tactics to acquire new subscribers because they feel filters are eating too many of their promotions to 3rd party lists.
They don’t say why filters are targeting them so much — but I’ll bet it’s a combination of the fact that their copy probably contains innocent words that may be common to spammers (such as dating), and that some rental lists on the B2C market are mis- represented as permission based, when they are actually junk names and thus would be filtered more.
Anyway, here’s the funny part of the story — while Date.com’s marketer tests various online ad tactics to raise sub sales that email formerly brought in, the company is covering part of the revenue shortfall by putting their own email list on the rental market. And, it’s so successful (after all these are direct response buyer names with lots of fabulous demographic selects) that they are considering also putting their snail mail list out there too.
Online sub site revenue tactics look more and more like offline sub product tactics every day. I know plenty of B2C print sub newsletters (Boardroom Reports, etc.) who’ve depended on list rental income for profits over the years.
http://directmag.com/ar/marketing_datecom_moves_away/index.htm
I’m typing this from the Internet Cafe in Times Square after speaking at the Online Publisher’s Association breakfast this morning on selling subscriptions online. Gotta hang out in NYC until the OPA webcast from 1-2 P.M. of same speech (only more
awake) for west coast people and then blow this steamy town for the beach.
Which, seeing how many empty cubes there were at Primedia/About Inc offices today (where breakfast was held), is what everybody’s doing.
Some stuff I picked up in between pontificating:
– About has just lured Debby Richman (sp?) away from heading up marketing at Overstock to now head up some of their subscription sales online. I know from interviewing her that Debby is the Queen of Stats-based direct response marketing online. If anyone can kick sub sales a** it’s her, so look for About sub stuff to rocket soon.
BTW: Utah is now such a hotbed of sub site selling. Between Debby and Ancestry and Sandlot, guess they’ll have to start their own little lunch group of sub bigwigs.
– Epicurious.com’s Taste Test paid newsletter which launched early this year is apparently doing fairly well and testing lots of neat marketing tactics. I look forward to interviewing them later in the year.
– Condenet among others is having solid success selling subs to print mags on its sites. Michael Zimbalist cited 70-90k subs per year as an “average” sales figure for average print mags online. Someone else said it can be a lot higher. Everyone agreed it was often a vastly different group of buyers than the traditional ones.
My take on this is: For years mag sub sales have depended for a large part on two things: 1. People who respond to direct mail (vast majority of subs) 2. People who use mag blow-in cards (the ones that fall in your lap when you read a new issue) to subscribe (tiny percent of subs, but highly profitable marketing
tactic).
Many many people out there don’t respond to these two tactics. While the online and offline demographics may be incredibly similar, for the first time you are putting a new type mag offers in front of people who were proven non-DM responders in the past. Enough like it to make 80-90% of online subs sold be people who never bought through traditional sub channels.
It doesn’t mean people are different, it means you widened your channel to appeal to more types of buyers.
Several biiig media companies have already started fretting about the latest version of the Google toolbar. This incredibly popular download (no nobody at Google will give me an exact number of downloads, but hey don’t you see it on everyone’s desktops?) will now block all pop-ups for sites you visit.
The problem for publishers is two-fold:
1. You still serve the pop-up. It’s just blocked on the recipient’s end. Your site stats will show you served a whole lot but suddenly your conversion stats will plummet. Oh goodie (sarcasm).
2. Many sub sites depend on pop-ups for the majority of their sign ups to new ezine, new magazine and new site trial takers. I’ve known some folks who tested an eyeblaster creative instead to use interruptive creative that’s not a pop-up. It didn’t work. At least for them.
OK, one last thing and I’m out of here in search of restroom (oh the fun of business travel). Hotmail is counting all messages in one’s “junk box” toward your total messages. If you get too much junk then you start bouncing the email you do want to get.
In the past this wasn’t a problem, because the box auto-deletes everything after 7 days. Now with the higher incidence of junk, I routinely lose incoming hotmail mail due to full-box bouncing, even when I ruthlessly delete stuff every day. If it’s happening to me, then it’s happening to all hotmail users because it’s a system so open to dictionary spam attacks (where spammers create lists tacking on words and letters to @hotmail.com endings and send until they get a live account).
This means anyone in the email publishing or list building game should be pushing hard to get Hotmail names to switch to other accounts, and you might even add a note next to your sign-up form saying something like “Hotmail accounts not recommended, if you want to make sure mail gets through please use a different email address. Thanks”
In our case, you’ll notice all MarketingSherpa sites ask for “Your work email” on purpose. That one little word “work” inserted into the sub form does wonders for us.
The Comcast ATTBI email address switch took place today, and although they told me in interviews that they were going to carefully transition one section of the US at a time, slowly making sure that each worked properly before moving on to the next, it appears that they switched the whole darn Nation (about 1.3 million users if I recall correctly) all at once.
They did email everyone lots of notes prior to with links to a “Transition Wizard” which if you clicked on the link would supposedly set up your PC to start accepting email in the new system in a lovely flawless easy fashion.
You know technology, the Wizard only worked for Outlook Express (although it wasn’t altogether clear in the copy that was the
case) so anyone using regular Outlook didn’t get email today. Plus, I’m now hearing from some Mac users that although there as a Mac-specific Wizard, it doesn’t appear to have worked either.
I’ve heard from users on both sides of the Country that the transition is very bumpy.
If you are an email list owner, expect lots of bounces, lower opens and lower clicks from ATTBI addresses for the next few days until stuff gets sorted out.
P.S. Noooo, do not simply switch the @attbi names on your list to @comcast. There is overlap in between the addresses on two lists and you will end up sending mail to the wrong people.
They say their true strength is in customer service, but NetFlix will probably end up spending much of their time and attention on lawyers bills as they defend their brand new patent for the idea of running an online subscription service.
A new report from Borrell Associates on how local TV stations are making money online, shows their sites only get 4% of total estimated local advertising online ad dollars. In comparison local newspaper sites get 40%. The rest is divided between big national sites offering local services and search marketing. (I suspect search is growing by far the fastest.)
http://www.borrellassociates.com/research.html
Want to know how much America’s top 100 National advertisers are spending online specifically, and how their ad spends in each media channel varied between 2001 and 2002? Here’s a link to the 79-page PDF of AdAge’s free report. (Includes agency names too.)
http://www.adage.com/images/random/lna03.pdf
