Sean's Journal
Write Me

Here is what I think needs to happen. Those ad companies like Burst need to hire some hardcore ad salesmen and get some execs with connections with Madison Avenue and topflight ad firms around the country. When a company makes an ad buy, include web advertisement with it.

Heck, do a product by product comparison. One product gets the web ads, another product doesn't. Do this with 10 different products (5 match ups) in 5 different key markets (Midwest, South, Northwest, Northeast, Southwest) and see if there is a change in brand consciousness or an increase in sales.

My personal belief is no one has put forth the time and energy to truly analyze the success rate of web advertisement. Everyone involved just wanted to use ad impressions and click-throughs to see if it was working, but that isn't realistic. There is a company in Chicago that owns benches at bus stops. This company sells the back of these benchs for advertisement. What kind of metric do they use to determine the level of success of an ad on the bench? A high traffic website should be able to sustain itself on advertisement, or at the very least supplement itself.

I get roughly 30 spam emails a week regarding ways of boosting the traffic to my website. This is a catch-22 in my opinion. Right now my traffic level keeps me below the bandwidth I'm allocated each month by my webhost. I can spike it once in awhile like I did with the Lord of the Rings jokes tht got picked up on a lot of the LotR discussion boards without paying any additional fees. With increased popularity comes increased bandwidth and suddenly I could no longer afford to run the website. Why build traffic if there isn't a benefit? Right now I'm questioning why I have a website and then I remember it is a hobby. While I like the ego gratification of knowing people out there who aren't my friends are reading stuff I wrote, maybe even enjoying it, I do all of this simply because I can. If I didn't have the website to tool around on I may very well take up woodworking or some other hobby that is more expensive.

Of course, I secretly wish I could make my hobby pay for itself. The $60/every two month commission checks I get kind of cover the cost, but doesn't fund development and speculation. Maybe I should focus on figuring this out and making zillions of dollars selling the information to others. Calling Bob Garfield . . .