Alex Schultz

Category: internet marketing

  • Revenue drivers (or not) in last two years

    If you have a website that gets 100k’s of visitors you can make a decent supplementary income from the web. Depending on the topic area you can make a lot. In some niches that can make you a lot more than a decent supplementary income but my sites aren’t in that category (yet 🙂 ). That being said I am lucky enough to have enough revenue and traffic to have fun data to share from time to time. So here are some fascinating points. 4 things have driven my revenue over the last 2 years:

    1. Traffic (specifically unique visitors not page views)
    2. CPMs (revenue per visitor in effect, I may write another series of posts about this)
    3. The bubble in video revenue around revver’s funding and the subsequent collapse in that bubble
    4. The economy collapsing and now the start of the recovery

    The below graph shows the collapse in revenue per visitor after Sep 07 when revver CPMs started to tank

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    The below graph shows year on year revenue growth which you can see took an initial hit post revver changes but tanked even harder in the middle of 08. I firmly believe advertising revenue for smaller sites is a great indicatory of economic trajectory (around the last recession my cpms tanked and then the news started talking of recession the same happened here).

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    Overall visitors have grown through this whole period very nicely. Page views have not since I have optimized for things like video views which users seem to love but means they view less pages.

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    And revenue has now recovered very nicely so that November was almost equal to the video bubble peak with revver paying out huge amounts for video views. In general I think this emphasizes that your view should always be on the long term… build traffic, build audience, make your sites better and revenue will follow over a multi-year period.

    So I am focusing on integrating social more and more right now into my sites and adding more video. Looking at the multi-year web trend I believe that’s where the future is so better get to it sooner rather than later. The present will take care of itself.

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  • I just cost myself $1000s blocking weight loss ads from adsense

    Google has this handy feature (which is certainly new from when I started using adsense) that allows you to block weight loss ads. You can find it at this url: https://www.google.com/adsense/site-targeted-ad-review

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    Mr Mander argued that my last post was unfair and that Google offers me the option to block these ads and that was a fair argument so I have gone ahead and done it. In general I agree with him but given I am a professional in this industry and wasn’t aware of this page (whereas he actually worked on adsense for 2years :)) it certainly suggests it wasn’t very well promoted vs the optimization reports on my homepage that tell me to add multiple ad units per page.

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    Anyway decision is made. Scammy weight loss ads removed from my site and I hope my users will benefit from a higher quality of ad on my site.

    I then went on to block the rest of the exploitative ads on my site (I don’t in general think politics is exploitative although I realize it offends some folks) and I find Google only allows me to block 8 of their 11 categories. Why? This just seems like a silly decision given together they only make around 25% of my revenue.

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    Ah well. I feel a lot better for blocking these evil ads. You should consider doing it too: https://www.google.com/adsense/save-excluded-ad-categories.do

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  • The rise, then fall, and maybe rise again of my tattoo empire

    You have heard a lot on this blog about my cocktail making and paper airplanes websites. I also created a site on butterfly tattoos in 2003 after a friend at university said it was really hard to find ideas for tattoos. I set up the site as a sub directory on cocktailmaking.co.uk/butterflytattoos. It was a typical site for me, a seed of content from me and then all user generated content with users uploading their own photos of Tattoos. Of course now I see how small I was thinking back when I launched this since less than a year later Zuck, Dustin, Chris et. al. launched facebook 😉 but I was proud of it and still am.

    I rapidly optimized the site into the top 10 results for “butterfly tattoos” and then to #1 in UK and #3 in US. As you can see from this graph comparing butterfly tattoo search volume to cocktail recipes search volume it’s a reasonably big term.

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    The traffic also was really promising. The below graph shows the traffic on this site over time reaching a peak (and looking like it was still growing rapidly) in January-February 2006.

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    At that time I had just left the UK and started my first job in silicon valley and I took my eye off the ball. Universal search became more and more important so all the traffic that was coming from a raw ranking started to leach to images.google.com results and the traffic collapsed. At the end of 2007 (just before I started at Facebook) I decided to revive the site again. It has a lot of links and as you can see a little traffic too so I did a bit of work and started to revive it but then I joined Facebook and the impact of having a really hard job with high focus long hours and no days off in a week was pretty clear:

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    So zoom forward to today. My weekends are gradually becoming my own again (although I was still in the office all day Saturday) and I am playing around with my sites (as you can probably tell from reading this). So I am going to give it another try. I have migrated the site to onlinetattoodesigns.co.uk (so that if it recovers I can give it a broader scope) and create a sitemap, google verified, 301’d everything across and so on… initially I lost all my google rankings and traffic dropped still further but in the last week traffic has been growing. Maybe I have found a way to finally turn that corner and I’ll have a third great site on my list. Here’s hoping and below is the daily page views for the last month and a bit:

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  • Chrome share up 200% year on year now 1 in 20 visits

    Chrome launched in 2008. I am lucky enough to have 300k visitors a month to my sites which is a decent sample size to get a read on a lot of things including browser market share. A while ago I did a post on browser market share over the last 4 years but now I just want to focus on Chrome.

    Chrome share over time

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    The most interesting thing for me as an internet marketer is that this growth is not organic. Organic growth tends to look exponential… a great product spreads virally where the rate of growth grows exponentially and this growth is linear. This is a marketing driven product leveraged out of Google’s huge web audience promoting the browser.

    Chrome is a home (not office) Software

    Chrome’s lowest % use is the start of the business day on the east coast (6am PST 9am EST) and it’s peak use is overnight in the US when (most) people are at home with internet explorer the inverse.

    IE just won’t die as long as IT departments rely on it so much but it is really getting crushed in the home market by chrome and everyone else. Outside of work hours there are now a few hours a day where internet explorer isn’t even the majority of visits anymore. That’s a huge shift.

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  • Bloat vs Lite

    A few colleagues here at Facebook put together a product called facebook lite. It launched last week to great acclaim and really set me thinking about bloat on my sites.

    My paper airplanes site is where I have focused so far. All the site does is show you how to make 27 paper airplanes. There are video and diagram instructions and you can vote on something as your favorite plane. That’s it. Somehow I bloated this into 90 different php scripts to run the site ignoring include files and so on. No wonder I got hacked (it happened again in February and I failed to notice) and always felt sick when it came to planning to update the site.

    Videos – I specifically created a section to make my users view more pages using video. I have reversed this decision now making it better for the users even if less page views for me. 3000 people a day are viewing these videos, they are better than the diagrams. This is my most compelling feature and was buried.

    Unusual/Fast/Alex’s Favorites/Gliders – Together these made up <10% of my page views and yet were linked from the main pages. They initiated <5% of my visits. Gone.

    search – On every page on my site I link to a search product from atomz. In the last year this page was viewed a total of 1000 times. What a waste of valuable real estate. Gone.

    paperairplanes.co.uk does one thing and does it well: show you how to make a paper airplane. It doesn’t take 90 php scripts to do that. It takes one page for each paper airplane and a couple of navigation pages. That is it.

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  • Getting YouTube Videos Up Again

    My parents bought me a flip mino camera for my birthday this year specifically so I could start filming and uploading YouTube videos again. My paper airplanes youtube channel gets around 1-2Million views a year growing at 50% year on year and has 500 subscribers. Yesterday I uploaded 3 new videos which within 7hours had 200views 15 ratings and 5comments, including this awesome comment:

    Whoa! Finally a new video! Nice. You were my first subscription ever. And sometimes I thought of unsubscribing. Recently actually. But I thought… what if he makes a new video. But I also thought it was 2 years since you did. But you did make a new video. It’s awesome btw.

    My goal is to build this video channel further. I have never done a minute of work to optimize it and have just used it as a vehicle to store videos for my website. I am going to turn every plane page on my site into a video page primarily and probably add more planes and then start to upload videos of me creating and flying stunt planes since those are pretty easy to do then see how far it is possible to get with a video channel and I will keep you all up to date. 10MM views a year takes 27k views a day or a little under 10x where I am today. Maybe I can do that, we’ll see.

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  • Challenges facing enterprise SEO marketing

    Working on enterprise internet marketing (100MM’s of pages and visits) is very different from sites with 100,000s or 1,000,000s of visits. I am very lucky to have had the chance to work across both of these scales with my personal sites and professional experience. This difference is becoming clearer and clearer to me.

    I was recently asked for my personal thoughts in a survey on the challenges facing SEO in a large internet company so I thought I’d start by sharing them:

    • Understanding the addressable market & actual current marketshare
    • Duplicate content issues
    • Getting deep links at scale to 100MM’s of pages
    • Self processing huge volumes of traffic data
    • optimizing 100MM’s of landing pages
    • calculating the value of a given potential seo change
    • dealing with international

    So anyway those are my thoughts on the challenges of enterprise SEO. Despite these it’s a really rewarding area to work and very possible to have success in this field.

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  • Amazing Speakers I have heard recently

    I wanted to share a little list of folks I have heard talk recently (online or in person) who I think are totally amazing and worth listening to:

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  • Behavioral targeting is getting almost ridiculous

    I am on The Guardian website (a British newspaper website) and I am being advertised to by the Mirage for rooms there (based on the fact that I have been browsing their site). On the whole I love retargeting, I think better ads are a good thing. That being said I would love to see folks being a bit more subtle about their retargeting.

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  • Yelp linking to Yahoo!

    I hope I am not slow on the uptake spotting this but are yelp and yahoo working together on local search? At the foot of a las vegas steakhouse review (this is my favorite steakhouse in las vegas by the way) there is a link to Yahoo! local.

    The link is not “no followed” and points to Yahoo local’s las vegas steakhouse page which is currently top ten in Google for a search for “las vegas steak houses” and is actually ahead of Yelp! I can’t see any reason Yelp! would be doing this unless it’s some kind of business relationship.

    Looking at the link profile for the yahoo local steakhouse page all 90 back links come from Yelp. It would be great if Google is ok with this for big companies since that would totally alter my backlinking strategy but I guess that the better user experience would be for Google to contain the links to the main web location for all the las vegas restaurants that yelp or yahoo have on their search results pages. I’m going to keep an eye on this one.

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