Why brief web traffic spikes don’t produce much revenue
I’ve gone long periods without advertising on Bloggasm, but back when I was using a simple Google Adsense platform I suddenly found myself on the front page of Digg, with more than 11,000 hits an hour flowing into my site. That day I made a measly $18 in Adsense clicks; a brief traffic spike does not a fortune make.
Neiman Lab has a piece up today about how local dailies are having trouble monetizing these kind of spikes:
How an errant vowel sent 3 million people to The Wichita Eagle, and why the paper couldn’t cash in
In a single afternoon, the Yahoo link sent roughly 3 million unique visitors to Kansas.com — which typically draws no more than 800,000 uniques per month, Nick Jungman, the site’s deputy editor for interactive news, told me today. That was enough to send the Eagle’s traffic numbers zooming past its rival three hours to the northeast, The Kansas City Star.
…Like most commercial websites, Kansas.com runs dirt-cheap remnant advertising when its traffic exceeds expectations in order to fill the space without wasting local advertisers’ money. For a local news site that occasionally attracts national attention, the spikes are nearly impossible to significantly monetize. One study found the average CPM for a news sites’ remnant advertising in the fourth quarter of 2008 was $0.34 — that is, for every 1,000 people who saw an ad, the site was paid 34 cents.
