Bit Revolver

Interesting observation: apparently, the topic of quitting smoking is big business for Internet advertising. Since I wrote about a method of using your PDA to help quit smoking, I have been deleting quite a few spam comments from the post.

Usually most of the spam that comes into my sites originates from automated systems. These comments on the other hand, appear to be from owners of ad-laden “how to quit smoking” sites who are actively seeking out blog posts like this in order to post a quasi-irrelevant comment with their URL attached.

I have been writing Of Zen and Computing for over two years, publishing computer help, tutorials, tips, tricks, and general technology information in my best attempt at Plain English. Over that time, I have published one article or post nearly every business day of the week. Why keep it up for so long? Advertising dollars? No. Making money is great, but it doesn’t provide fulfillment. E-mails like this do, though:

I am a radio reporter and your tip for recovering deleted files from a memory card just saved my tuchus. I conducted three hours of interviews yesterday and thought they’d been lost. But the PC Inspector Smart Recovery found the files. It took more than 2 hours to process. But it was worth it. Thank you for your website — it’s a great public service.

- Jill B

With hundreds of millions of blogs on the Web, and most bloggers quitting after just a few weeks or months, it is easy to feel like just another drop in the bucket. Without a clear vision of why I blog, I too would probably have quit a long time ago… but hearing from readers who have directly benefited from my writing is the perfect motivation.

Leon Ho of lifehack.org reflects on the site’s growth from zero to 12,000 RSS subscribers. Looking at his graph of subscribers over time, I wondered about the relationship between the growth of lifehack.org’s subscriber base versus its metrics with regards to traditional web traffic. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of lifehack.org’s subscriber growth versus traffic growth:

As it turns out, lifehack.org’s subscriber growth is right in line with it’s traffic growth (traffic according to Alexa, that is). If you smooth out the traffic spikes from the Alexa traffic graph, the two fit together almost perfectly. I was a little surprised by this, partly because I have never really looked into the general relationship between subscriber growth and traffic growth in websites. I expected the relationship between the two graphs to be much more logarithmic (in favor of web traffic), instead of so linear.

At first I reasoned that the relationship between these two graphs was due to the sophisticated nature of the readership that lifehack.org carries. Lifehack.org is a site that attracts a much more technologically savvy crowd than other non-tech related sites. To investigate this theory I produced the same side-by-side comparison between the subscriber growth and traffic growth for my own Of Zen and Computing. While OZaC is also a technology-related site, its target audience is not the tech-elite, but rather the tech-curious (even though I’m flattered to have had a handful of “tech savvy” subscribers pick up my feed, such as the LifeHacker editors). Once again, I expected a logarithmic relationship between the two graphs, with web traffic growth out-performing subscriber growth by far.

Surprise - virtually the same result as lifehack.org. I’m almost certain that subscription spike in late October was due to one of the major aggregation services suddenly beginning to report how many of its users subscribed to my feed. Because of that, I’m imagining that a more accurate graph would have a much smoother transition between September ‘06 and November ‘06.

Once again I am intrigued, although my lack of an explanation may be all together due to my lack of seasoned chops when it comes to Internet marketing. This is also a completely terrible and unscientific “study”, because I am using three completely different analytics services to measure two different samples of data.

Tech author/evangelist Guy Kawasaki recently wrote “A Review of My First Year of Blogging“, a post to his personal blog which, among other things, disclosed his 2006 advertising revenue. Kawasaki’s blog served up over 2.4 million page views in ‘06, but only grossed $3,350.

The Kawasaki story was picked up by a number of news sources and blogs, then quickly spread through the SEO, marketing and professional blogging world. Most webmasters speculated as to the various reasons for Kawasaki’s abismal advertising revenue, and some even went so far as to claim the Google AdSense system (Kawasaki’s source of ad revenue) is worthless for bloggers. Such claims couldn’t be further from the truth.

• Kawasaki’s website featured a single, poorly positioned Google ad unit.
• Kawasaki’s readership is a sophisticated one — one that’s less likely to click on ads.
• Kawasaki writes on a broad range of topics, making it more of a challenge for a contextual advertising system like AdSense to serve up highly targeted ads.

Guy Kawasaki’s 2006 Google AdSense revenue says nothing about the potential of the AdSense system as a source of income for bloggers. The conversation around Kawasaki reveals many, many webmasters who claim to make much more money from significantly less traffic. For sites with a specific subject matter and a targeted audience, AdSense pays out very, very well. Meanwhile, Kawasaki’s own CPM comes out to a pitiful $1.39.

Kawasaki’s ‘06 numbers more likely mean that (a) casual ad placement is detrimental to a blog’s ad revenue, and (b) AdSense and Guy Kawasaki probably weren’t meant to be together in the first place. Since the arrival of the new year, Kawasaki has switched from AdSense to Federated Media.

Finally, it’s likely that a blog called “How to Change the World”, written by an already wildly successful author, speaker and evangelist, is meant for a greater purpose than advertising revenue. After all, he admits that he uses the money to fuel his hockey addiction.