Re: Fear of discussion sites

From: Michael Martinez <Michael_at_xenite.org>
Date: Tue 03 Oct 2000 15:38:34 -0500

AMY BELLINGER <amylooo_at_worldnet.att.net> WROTE:
> Here's the main reason I subscribed to this list. I
> abandoned hope of finding an ad rep firm which would
> take on a discussion site a couple of years ago, and
> have recently decided to try again to find one.

Amy, I have been told by people with similar page view
statistics on non-discussion sites that the
advertising companies don't do well on discussion
sites. In my own experience, the banners which did the
best were those which linked to relevant sites.
Hence, the AltaVista banners that a network ran on my
forums one month did very badly. I don't think they
got any click-thrus. Science fiction fans don't want
to click on search engine banners when they are
discussing books and television shows.

I did, however, run a banner for a couple of weeks for
MP3Lit.Com. They were very pleased with the results,
though they didn't share any numbers with me. The
banner was directed at fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and ran
on our Tolkien/Inklings forum.

I did just run a banner the other day (across a large
part of my domain) about the Olympic Gymnast whose
gold medal was taken away. Out of 2492 exposures in
the first 24 hours I got 15 click-thrus. People on my
domain just weren't interested (though it could be the
banner is poorly designed).

Web site relevance is very important to banner
campaigns, now more than ever, in my opinion. And, to
be blunt, I'm not sure there are many commercial
banner campaigns that would do well on as tightly
focused a literary site as yours. You may have to
find some specific advertisers and set up your own
campaigns. It certainly sounds like you've got the
traffic to do it.

If you have other Web sites you're developing, try
promoting them on your forums until you get better
response from advertisers. Don't let your promotional
power languish just because no one else is taking
advantage of it.

Science Fiction and Fantasy
info_at_xenite.org
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http://www.xenite.org/forums/
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Received on Tue Oct 03 2000 - 15:38:34 CDT