Qualityviews

March 27, 2010

From Ryan Catbird:

One day, not long from now, people will look back and this is what they’ll say:

“Can you believe how stupid we were back then? All we cared about was “pageviews, pageviews, pageviews;” full stop. And all the while, we never really gave much of a damn about the quality of those views— or of the person doing the viewing. I don’t know how we could have been so stupid. And for so long.”

As someone who sells advertising I can relate and definitely agree. I haven’t really had to fight against the urge of my advertisers to count only pageviews, but I definitely work to dispel the myth that it’s only about the count, not the quality.

EE Insider has, fortunately, become a regular read for a lot of people working with ExpressionEngine. The value to advertisers has never been the number of pageviews; it’s always been about the quality of those views. If you are selling something directly related to ExpressionEngine, EE Insider readers are your audience and the pageviews may not be in the millions but they’re high quality.

This allows me to give my advertisers access to exactly their audience while giving the readers only advertisements that relate to their work with ExpressionEngine. No telecom ads, generic Google ads or anything of the sort. I would cease advertising before offering those.

(All of this is why I generally dislike the idea ad networks that carry a roster of sites from varying fields and topics.)

Let’s face it. Readers would prefer no advertising at all. I know I would. But the current model requires costs be covered, so it’s an unfortunate necessity. The very least publishers can do is only take ads that are high quality to both the advertiser and the reader.