Alex Schultz

Blog

  • 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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  • The domain migration may be working

    I recently migrated my paper airplanes site to a new domain and was worried about the SEO impact. The good news is that it looks like the migration is working. Google has started indexing the new domain and my rankings are slowly recovering. The 301 redirects seem to be passing authority properly. It’s still early days but the signs are positive.

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  • YouTube Insights – Further Enhancements

    A recent update from the youtube insights team that (it seems) didn’t even merit a blog post has made the youtube insights even better which is awesome.

    Below you can see the data on my paper airplane video views for just the UK traffic. The way the new stats work you can select a region or country you want to dive into and the whole of the rest of the page will update to show you the insights for just that country: demographic, top videos, daily views vs time and in the US even state level data (TX and CA love my site ;)!

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    Hats off to the youtube insights team for another nice advance… I loved checking out my youtube dashboard before and will now enjoy it even more.

    One practical thing which would be awesome is to make the discovery section below a little bit better:

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    I would love to understand which videos dominate where my key related video referrals come from (are my own videos referring other videos or is it other people’s) and then which related videos are actually being referred to. I would also love to understand what “featured video” really means in more depth and so on. I could then create more content tailored to appeal to those videos/channels.

    Either way things keep getting better with youtube insights. Nice job team!

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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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  • Great social media analysis from Alan Long in Oz and NZ

    One of the biggest mistakes folks in silicon valley make is starting too much at what goes on out here and ignoring the rest of the world. That is not to say of course that there is always something better somewhere else in the world (since often the best companies move here – e.g. Facebook from Harvard) but it is true that there are lots of interesting things outside of the bubble.

    One of the more interesting people I follow in the web analytics space is Alan Long at Hitwise in Asia Pacific. His latest two articles on social media are definitely worth a read.

    The highlights are pretty obvious but firstly social networking is growing very fast in Asia Pacific and much of that growth is being driven by Facebook. Secondly in New Zealand (and very shortly in Australia) social networking has overtaken search as the most visited industry segment online.

    I really believe the Marshal McLuhan “the medium is the message” idea. If we truly believe the internet is the dominant media vehicle of our time and social networking is becoming the #1 activity on the internet very rapidly then we have to accept that the world is going to become more and more driven by conversation and participation again and less driven by just sitting in front of the goggle box and passively consuming.

    I think this is a good thing. The next century is going to be amazing!

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  • Facebook feed sites getting into top 100 on the web

    I was taking a little look at the top 100 sites on Quantcast yesterday.

    One thing that really excited me was to see zynga.com and causes.com in the top 100.

    The reason I was so stoked is that I think it’s an awesome sign for the power of Facebook that sites basically driven by Facebook can bust into the top 100. In many ways up until now you had to be driven by Google or entirely your own steam to get there. Now there is another awesome source of traffic on which to build a business.

    Really nice to see.

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  • Cocktail season is upon us – thanksgiving and Halloween traffic comparisons for UK and US cocktails

    This Friday I saw a nice spike in my Friday traffic to cocktailmaking.co.uk, the highest since Halloween and beyond that best since the summer cocktail period. I am excited the holiday cocktail season has begun.

    I have included the traffic graph for my US traffic over the last two months. One really fascinating thing for me is that Halloween is now a really big cocktail period and the fun co-incides with the weekend due to the holiday. You can also see that Thanksgiving is great for cocktails, there is a really clear midweek spike for thanksgiving which doesn’t fit the normal periodicity of my traffic (saturday and sunday high, mid-week low).

    When you compare that to the UK traffic you can clearly see no double spike around thanksgiving but everything else looking really similar (halloween is a little less pronounced).

    I love looking at different countries and seeing how they vary and more importantly how similar they are. Much of my career I have talked to people who expound the differences between markets but so often with internet marketing countries are more similar than different.

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  • a little bit of a data issue with google trends for websites

    I don’t think I am giving anything away when I say the facebook stats page at the start of 2009 said: 150MM users 50% of whom log in daily i.e. 75MM daily users and today says 300MM 50% of which log in daily i.e. 150MM daily visitors. Hitwise, Comscore, Compete, Nielsen etc… tend to back this up. However Google trends for websites not so much.

    I think there is some more work to be done here esp. since one of the largest sites on the web can have such inaccurate data on Google trends. This is a shame since I really think google trends for websites and adplanner are awesome tools and this makes me lose a little faith in them 🙁 That being said plain old Google trends data looks fine.

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