As you might have noticed, I've added a new obnoxious ad space to Precocious. Let me assure you, it *is* a soulless act indeed! I'm trying to figure out a new ad combo for the site that brings in a bit more revenue. For a site with my readership, my PW bids are WAY low - and that's a problem. Part of this is lack of name recognition. I may have more readers, but I don't have the reputation yet. Not surprising. I'm a young comic, with little niche market appeal and I'm bad at networking. The other contributing factor is that I chose to be nice instead of greedy. Each of my ad spaces offers multiple slots of bidders. The more ads the bid on, the less advertisers big AGAINST each other. That's what drives up prices, after all.
There's also the idea of campaigns, which bid on a buttload of ad spaces with no discretion. Most campaigns are leaderboard, skyscraper and banner. My main ad box is... half-banner. A lot of advertisers don't even HAVE half-banner ads. By adding the leaderboard space, I now have campaign bait. Even though the placement is not optimal (for now), campaigns are blind to that. It's cheap, I know, but I am getting really tired of lagging behind in revenue. This money is the SOLE funding for my own ad campaigns. The less I make, the less ads I bid on and the less readers I bring in. New readers are good things!
The problem with throwing in ANOTHER ad box is that it further dilutes my ad spaces., which means even less competition (and thus bid wars) for ad spots. Having 10 optimally placed button ads will nab you 20 cents a day. Having one leaderboard in that space instead can nab you a dollar. (In PW terms, a dollar is a lot!) What I may do is swap out my half-banner ads with the leaderboard. At least on the home page. It messes up the spacing, which bugs me, but it might help revenue. I put it on the old Precocious page if you want to see how it'd look. It also might mean I have just one space earning 3o cents instead of four earning 10 cents. I am, unfortunately, an artist - my business acumen is lousy. All I can do is throw ideas at the wall and observe the results.
2 comments:
Have you tried making a forum board, a fan forum. You can get them free at Proboards.com. I mean, you can get some publicity from that.
I can't imagine a forum would get much activity unless Precocious was A LOT bigger. It also confuses things as to where to put comments. Right now I'm happy with people commenting directly on the comic. You're free to talk about whatever you want there.
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