I was reading this post over at Tech Recipes about the top 10 things webmasters should know about the Digg Effect. The article is generally well written but there is one glaring error.
1. Digg users do not click ads. Webmasters should stop trying to game the system to get the traffic. The increased traffic will use up your bandwidth and will risk slowing down or crashing your server. In the short run, getting on the front page is more likely to cost you money than make you money if you are depending on ads for your revenue. We don’t care as we give most of our ad proceeds back to our users in the forms of gifts and such. I am not certain why digg users do not click on ads; however, my best guess is that a lot of this traffic is just people surfing to see what’s popular in the internet world. Surfers are not looking for anything in particular; and therefore, they are not going to be influenced by content-targeted ads on the site. Webmasters, quit trying to abuse digg for your greed; it does not work.
I can understand why Digg users don’t click on any ads on Tech Recipes (just look at the site), but to say Digg users don’t click ads is simply incorrect. When I got Dugg on How To Clean Your Keyboard, I made an extra $500 because of the extra traffic coming from Digg, and most of that came from CPC ads, so don’t tell me Digg users don’t click on ads because they do. I have never lost money on a Digg before – every one of them resulted in 100’s of dollar of extra income.
Any traffic can be monetized. Ad placement, targeting and optimization are the keys. This is something Tech Recipes doesn’t seem to understand. So in their minds they believe Digg users don’t click on ads, or what extra money they would make won’t even cover their bandwidth cost. Bandwidth is cheap! You can get 1,000 Gigs for $99 and they’ll even toss in a free server. Tech Recipe states a Digg creates an extra Gig of bandwidth per day for 5-7 days. So what’s that? 50 to 70 cents additional bandwidth cost – hardly anything to worry about. The main problem is whether the server can handle that many connections at once, but that’s a hardware cost, not bandwidth.
I wonder if the owners of Tech Recipe realize what they’re sitting on. The site looks like it’s getting very high traffic based on their Alexa ranking and their Who’s Online data, which was showing 1,881 visitors online at the time I visited. The site should easily pull down $20,000 a month if it was properly monetized.
If Tech Recipe is reading this, give me a shout if you want to make some serious money off the site.