Anecdotal Evidence – Sites with High Repeat Visitors vs Sites with Large Reach
By Paul Edmondson February 11th, 2009
From our stable of publishers, the sites that have been hit the hardest in the economic crunch are sites with high visitor return rates that consume many pages per session. They are down as much as 50% usually from the display ad (CPM) networks. Sites in this category include social networks, blogs, rich media sites (photo galleries and video sites) and forums.
Sites that tend to get the majority of their traffic from natural search (like our HubPages.com and other content sites), CPC rates are down about 8%. We think this category of site is doing better during the crunch since the monetization model was always more performance-oriented, and traffic less reliant on a smaller base of routine visitors who might only have a passing interest in the site’s advertising.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 11th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
What are the absolute revenues for those two classes of sites?
February 12th, 2009 at 8:54 am
HubPages had a CPM of $1.50 yesterday on a per ad basis. The site gets 80+% of traffic from search engines and is monetized by mainly text based ads. 90+% of visitors were to the site for the first time yesterday and viewed less than three pages per visit.
A social networking site that has over twenty pvs per session, less than 10% of traffic from natural search, most visitors had been to the site before had effective CPMs of 8 cents yesterday. Down about 50% from December.
February 14th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
You post makes total sense. The numbers from social networking sites fits my experience as well (some sections of their sites do better or and some do worse than $0.08 eCPM).
I think the challenge ad-based sites with loyal customers is to provide not only relevant content and user experience (the community) but also relevant advertisements. Interestingly, we’ve been able to create good lift for our partners in this social networking category using various forms of “targeting the people not the page”.
I guess my question about absolute revenue was misguided – the percent change in effective CPM is probably the better metric.
December 12th, 2009 at 6:47 am
thank you your information was useful for me, thanks