A couple of months ago I noticed that we were getting less interest in those looking to buy ad space while at the same time more corporations were sending us email wondering what kind of traffic we had in case they wanted to buy space. Of course time has passed and lately we’ve been lucky to have ANY spots taken. Our traffic has never been better and yet we seem to have some disease that keeps everyone away.
This leads me to believe two things. We either don’t offer enough incentive for you to support us our we have a bad structure for buying ad space. The first one is easy to fix by making everyone aware that over the coming weeks we will be posting interviews with Applegeeks, Devil’s Panties, Questionable Content, Dominic Deegan, Real Life, Chugworth Academy, and 8-bit Theatre. But that is only half of our material as we also have interviews with Rob & Elliot, Monster Guy, Stuff Sucks, No 4th Wall to Break, and Dr. McNinja. If that is not incentive enough I will also through reviews on blog for anyone who buys a month or more along the side and a podcast review for anyone who buys a month or more of the top banner.
The second issue I’m not really sure how to address. When we first thought of doing the advertising we purposely kept it simple so new web comics would be open to advertising as we have always had the new guy in mind. Now that idealism seems to hurting us. More people are looking for packages or more complicated systems such as click tracking. What have been some of your problems and answers to the ad space problem?
Your pricing is very nice and allows easy access to lower end advertisers. However, from what I can remember the last time I had an ad with you, my actual click-throughs were very low compared to the number of visitors you were receiving.
So while your show traffic may be going though the roof, how much of that is actually funneling into the site and not just listening through the RSS feed?
I have wondered what the click-throughs were and the effect of having most of our content downloadable through RSS. The only thing I can think of is to place the ads directly into the articles themselves.
The other side is to tie the ads into the posts by doing the reviews I\’ve promised. This should tie the readers more directly to them and pak their interest.
What have others in this circumstance done to get pass this issue?