Larvatus Prodeo

People might remember that I promised on the thread about the introduction of ads on LP to report back on how it was going. We’ve now gone through the first full month of ads, so here’s the report!

The gross revenue we earned during April was $3,434.81. Commission is 50%, with 40% going to the advertising broker, and 10% to the network. So the net is $1717.40. We’re paid on the basis of $18 gross per 1000 ad impressions for each page impression. There are 2.5 ads on each page. Nielsen, which does the measuring, only counts Australian visitors, so while posts such as this one with Chelsea Clinton in the title attract a lot of search engine hits, most of that traffic would be from outside Australia. (Though our server stats suggest the great majority of traffic comes from Australia.) We also only get an ad impression (obviously) where people don’t have an ad-blocker plugin installed, or have disabled the plugin for LP.

I’m going to do a comparison between our server stats and the Nielsen numbers to estimate what proportion of views produce an ad impression, but I’m yet to do so. In the meantime, our server stats show we had 80514 unique visitors in April, 176894 visits, 1175376 page views and 3384784 hits. 46.34 gigabytes of bandwidth was served.

The site upgrade cost us a total of $4118.99. We received generous donations totalling $860, which I’ll be paying to The National Forum now that I have the invoice, and the rest will come out of the advertising revenue - which means in effect that it will take us another month before any of that revenue actually accrues to us. Thanks so much for your help! But I’m going to ask for some more - you might recall that the LP collective had agreed that the revenue would initially be shared between promotion of the blog and some recompense to me, to assist me while I’ve been sacrificing paid work in order to finish my PhD this year. The problem is that I’m still sacrificing the income, but because there’s also a time lag of about 3 months between when we earn the ad revenue and when we get paid, we won’t actually see a cent of it until September! So so far, it’s not really fulfilling that purpose, so if you’d like to contribute to the Mark scholarship fund, me, my landlord and my credit cards will all be really grateful!

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