I have been running this blog for more than two years. Mainly as an experiment and hobby. And of course I try to be useful by publishing interesting materials on technical topics. Unfortunately, nothing in this world is free - you have to fork out for hosting every year. And I make money from it through advertising. This is what I want to talk about today.
Advertising comes in different forms. The most popular option is contextual, which you are all used to seeing on many sites. These are Yandex and Google banners. And the webmaster’s earnings depend on the location of the advertising blocks. And what more money, the more enthusiasm the blogger has and better quality project. Recently, a service for testing advertising units Realbig.media appeared.
On every site, including my blog, you can place advertising in several ways: at the beginning, middle and end of the article, on the side (in the sidebar), in the header or footer of the site. But what if Google AdSense will bring in more money, YAN, and the site owner will not know about it? I decided to test different formats at each location on the blog to see which ads my readers liked best and which ones I shouldn't run.
The service is very convenient, with a beautiful design, and most importantly, it’s free. That is, all the goodies that are there on at the moment offered free of charge – a rarity these days.
What can RealBig do?Constant improvements lead to information becoming irrelevant within a week. Therefore, I will talk about its capabilities for today: 12/11/2018:
All settings are made in your personal account. Only a plugin is installed on the site, which displays the code in real time and does not load the server with additional scripts. Management and statistics of all your projects are also available in your personal account. Different ad formats may work better on different sites, so making the same settings is impractical. Constant experimentation leads to increased profits. The income analysis is very clear and detailed.
Affiliate networksIn addition to Yandex and Google, there are other small companies that offer webmasters to make money on their sites. These may be manufacturers or stores of various goods. In Realbig you can set up synchronization with personal account such affiliate programs, and the statistics of their advertising impressions will also be taken into account. The most popular ones are available now: MediaVenus, Oblivki, Advertur, Medicineteaser. The list will be updated.
Banners and teasersThe first is a picture, clicking on which takes you to the advertiser’s website, the second is a picture with a caption. Usually advertising companies provide ready materials, but if you want to advertise your product, you will have to draw a banner yourself.
The constructor is very simple and allows you to do both. The font, picture size, color and shape of the frame, and other little things change. Previously, I had to learn CSS styles and HTML markup, but now I go to RealBig and do it all there with a preview. It’s very convenient; the output is a ready-made code that needs to be inserted as an advertising block.
PushA relatively new fashion trend is pop-up messages in the browser. Works on both computers and mobile devices Oh. On my website you may also have noticed a notification asking you to subscribe. I don’t send out advertising through push notifications, I plan to send notifications about new publications through the RSS feed, so feel free to subscribe. Even if the blog is closed in your browser, you will understand from the pop-up that I have written a new interesting article.
- In the sidebar there was a large 300x600 block from Yandex (settings below) and the same from Google. In terms of clicks, the bourgeois bloc won, but the Russian bloc has more SPM. The impressions were only on desktop. The sidebar is not displayed on mobile devices. This is 48% of all traffic.
- Under the content there were 3 different options: adaptive Yandex and Google blocks and a horizontal Yandex poster, which wins in terms of the number of clicks. For the purity of the experiment, it was probably necessary to install some other option for Google, but so be it.
- In the middle of the article, 3 options were also placed: 2 square Google blocks, a vertical poster with one ad from Yandex, and a combined block with Google adaptive and Yandex motion, which won by a wide margin. There is one point here - the combined block could be calculated incorrectly and overestimate the results, so I went into the offices of both systems and checked the data. In Google there were 2 clicks for $0.13, and in Yandex 1767 impressions for 107 rubles. Visibility 25%, SPM 60r. Compared to the others, motion in the middle actually generates more income. There is an overestimation, including due to mobile devices, on which swiping is often counted as a click. Therefore, I think the number 53 is incorrect.
This idea has been brewing in my head for a long time, but I kept putting off writing the post.
I want to try crowdsourcing.
I'll be brief.
Technical details - based on a framework (I haven’t decided which one is best to use yet), most likely with the classic php+mysql connection
Architecture - 3 main levels (Site -> Page -> Blocks)
Website - set the name, URL and you can add a comment
Page (or pages) - you can give a rule to either a specific page or a section, for example a listing. Pages are naturally created within a site. Here you receive a code that you paste into the site. The code insertion itself will be implemented as follows: insert the script into the template once, and then display div tags with the desired id in the right places.
Blocks are actually created here advertising blocks. So far, at the start, only 1 type of block “Advertising code” (Adsense or YAN) is planned. For each block, you can set display conditions, as long as there is only one choice by device - desktops or mobile. If this whole topic takes off, we will gradually add new settings: GEO (both countries and major cities Russia), display by time of day and day of week, etc. Then you can add new types of blocks (banners, teasers, etc.)
But all these wishes are still in the distant future, because it is not yet clear whether this product will be in demand or not.
According to my rough estimates, you need at least 40-50k rubles to start, this is purely payment for the programmer’s work to create some kind of more or less working product.
If the minimum amount is reached, we start working. Everyone who chipped in gets the product for free + updates for 1 year.
If the amount is not collected, then we close the project and forget everything. Of course I send all the money back.
Why is all this needed?As you probably know, there are not many normal rotators on the market now; there was such a poser, but the author abandoned it and has no plans to develop it. There is also realbig.media, but this is an online solution, and besides, there are complaints about the quality and speed of work, and this is very critical.
What are the advantages of our product?The first, and most important in my opinion, is autonomy. You do not depend on anyone, you have set up your own server and use it as you wish.
Secondly, the ability to scale, it all depends only on the settings of your server + almost completely open source.
Third, the ability to actually influence the course of product development and add only those functions that are actually needed.
Actually, I described it quite briefly, if you have questions, write in the comments.
Nowadays it hangs just for formality.
Now, instead of the latest posts from advertisers’ blogs, there are my own ads, refs and links to my projects. There is now only one place and it is not for sale.
To do this, we had to slightly rewrite the script for displaying ads. More precisely, it is much easier to make it.
Results and reasons for closing the monetization experimentI think the experiment was quite successful. Two dozen advertisers were recruited and $100 in profit was received, which is essentially nice. Few people, of course, were interested in this unusual type of advertising, but there were some. Which is also very nice.
And I cover direct monetization for the following reasons:
- I write only when I feel like it. Therefore, there are serious fluctuations in attendance. This is incomprehensible and unpleasant for advertisers.
- It is more profitable to advertise your projects. One click by a random SEO specialist on a link to a list of exchanges to buy links can bring good passive income in several services at once.
- You can advertise about exchanging electronic currency or searching for performers. And also other little things.
Our script is ultra simple. He takes a random link from the database, sticks it into the template and displays it in in the right place site. That's all.
First, we create the promo table in the MySQL database. We will store our advertisements in it. Minimum fields: identifier, status (just in case) and link elements.
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `promo` (
`id_promo` smallint(6) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`url` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`anchor` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`status` tinyint(1) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id_promo`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
Then we load the MSQL.php library onto the host. This is a database driver - a layer between naked SQL queries and the developer. Use any ORM or don't use it at all. That's your business.
We also create 3 files: C_Promo.php, M_Promo.php, Promo.tpl.php. Model (library), controller and view (template).
In C_Promo.php we write the code:
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