Do any of you every purchase advertising? If so, would you advertise in a newspaper without knowing its circulation? Or in a magazine when you had no idea of the sort of readers it attracted?
I run a few websites which earn their keep by selling advertising. About half of the revenue comes from AdSense, and the other half from individual advertisers. This morning I sent a renewal notice to one of these individuals - a firm that has been advertising on my site for six years.
The advertiser immediately replied by asking to see the visitor stats for the pages he advertises on. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. It's a perfectly correct and reasonable thing to ask for. So, why am I mentioning it here? Because this is the first time in ten years of selling advertising that anyone has ever asked me for this type of information.
It's remarkable that any business would spend a large sum of money on advertising, without having a clue as to how many people their adverts are likely to reach. It would be strange if they advertised in that way in a newspaper. But at least you can make some rough assumptions about a newspaper's circulation, if only by looking at whether people are reading it on your bus or train. But with a website, you are totally in the dark. For all you know, the site might get no visitors at all apart from the webmaster and his family. Yet otherwise sensible business people seem willing to spend their money on it.
Does anyone have any experience of this issue, either as a website operator or as an advertiser? It would be interesting to know whether my own experiences are typical.
Mike
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