Update (4/17): someone just pitched in $150, so $15->$165 in the article below, which changes the conclusion… since the tip jar is about 10x what it was before, and advertising was looking 10-100x more profitable than donation, now donation is roughly on par with the low end of those advertising figures, which I think is really impressive. Thanks very much, Jason!
———————-
People have suggested that I should have ads running on the site to capitalize on its traffic, but I disagree with them, because I think they would just get in the way, and people wouldn’t be interested in looking at what those ads would have to sell anyway.
I do like being able to pay rent, though, so a couple of weeks ago, on a whim, I put up a tiny link to a “tip jar” with a link to a PayPal donation in the row of links on the filter box.Â
Since that point there have been some very nice folks who have dropped some money in. Not a huge amount, but better than the $0 I was expecting.
Anyway, I thought I’d run the numbers while writing this to see how much this site is making on a per-user basis, and then make some conjectures about how much it would make with ads, and do a little comparison (even if ads blow the donations out of the water, I’m still not considering putting up ads, don’t worry). If there’re no interesting results, I’ll just delete the post at the end.
So here we go:
Donations so far: $15
Approximate number of unique visitors in 2 weeks: 13,000
$15.00/13,000 visitors = $0.00115384615/visitor, or about 1/10th of a cent per person
Now, compare this to some examples with CPM ads:
Each visitor views, on average, 10 apartment listings, so one could say that that equates roughly to 13,000*10 = 130,000 pageviews for the two week period.
I’ve seen CPM rates of between $1-10 per thousand views quoted elsewhere on the web, which, for padmapper, would mean $10-100 per thousand visitors, or $0.01-0.10 per unique visitor.
So that’s roughly a 10-100x improvement over the donation numbers. I think I’ll keep the post 🙂
Again, I don’t really care that PadMapper could make more with ads, because I think ads would harm the site’s functionality, but someone asked how well the tip jar worked since they liked the model/implementation. Basically, I wouldn’t recommend it as a replacement for ads unless you’ve got something against ads.
Then again, maybe you could probably post better results than I have with the donation model by making a site that makes people feel very grateful, or by making the donation part more prominent.
Leave a Reply