Ironic as websites get better, revenue can decline
March 25, 2009 by David
Filed under Making Money
It has been asked on the domain name forums about improved ways to make money from mini-sites and other websites, including blogs and forums, such as WordPress blogs for example.
One reason that is asked is because domainers who run blogs or forum boards typically encounter extremely poor results as far as advertising revenue is concerned. It has been widely reported blogs and forums have “ad click rates” of 0.01% or lower, which is dramatically less than most all other website categories. A lower “CTR” normally results in lower revenue.
There appears to be very little that can be done to improve the dismal revenue for blogs/forums because of content issues. What we mean by that is obviously folks who operate blogs and forums want to do a quality job and get considerable valuable content to make their site better and result in a good visitor experience.
With that said, the main issue is quite ironic because the better the blog or forum is as far as good content is concerned the worse the revenue tends to be. As the owner adds more and more nice content he/she will see their PPC (pay-per-click) revenue constantly on the decline. So quite ironically the better job being done ends-up with less income from website ads.
Why does that scenario happen? In our opinion the primary reason is visitors tend to get seriously ‘distracted’ by the content. The more content they see and the better the content is as far as informative or entertaining value goes the visitors will be much more inclined to read the posts but end-up paying little if any attention to the advertising and marketing on the pages (which is usually there to pay the bills).
That situation is a most unfortunate position for the web site owner to be in and is contrary to the goal of providing valuable information to the site visitors, which of course is incredibly ironic.
P.S. The above odd scenario is also typical with non-blog and non-forum websites too. If anyone reading this knows of possible solutions or has some suggestions on ways to solve this problem they are invited to post a comment.
