PeakD - No More Ads (test over)
We quietly turned off ads on PeakD.com a little while back and we meant to say something about it.
It's been quite a bit of time since we turned off ads however we had a few people ask so it's worth sharing a post about the experience.
Here's our post as to why we believed the ad system wasn't worth the inconvenience to the viewers. ADs was not meant to be a revenue generator for PeakD itself but hoped it would benefit all of Hive and the bought and burned Hive would help the ecosystem. We feel there is more benefit to Hive having an AD free PeakD. If the revenues were larger that would have been an easier decision, however they weren't so it was a pretty easy decision. In short... the ad system never generated even more than the labor-cost to develop it.
CHALLENGES
We knew there was a bunch of things stacked up against us for ads on PeakD.com
- Majority of visitors on mobile
- Majority of visitors from low ad revenue countries
- No strong central theme to connect to a certain theme of ads
- A good amount of our own users use Brave or ad blockers
We could have done things to improve number of ad impressions... however the value per ad (CPM) just wasn't great.
Yes we used Google Adsense which is historically one of the lower paying options however we figured it would give us a good idea. In fact we worked with a team that helped us make a bunch of changes to our implementation to improve the system. Yes it was making money but it just wasn't worth it to the community. Yes we could have continued to tweak it and improve the CPM however it had a long way to go to be at the point we figured would be useful.
There weren't a lot of impressions and we could have worked to figure that out even if a good chunk of visitors go to communities these days or feeds (where we didn't put ads) and we could have added ads to more pages but even so if we had increased those impressions the CPM just wasn't going to be useful.
NEVER ADS?
We think there is a place for ads. In fact our own ad bid system on PeakD has continued to be used plenty over the years and could deserve more attention and imporvements and likely could have more impact than something like Adsense. As far as AD networks we know they would perform better when the ad fits in better with content. They would likely fit in better with large communities... when communities or particular pages start to get thousands of views each day it would be worth looking into with some partnership with the communities.
So in short... we are not against ads. And we won't say NEVER... however right now it's for sure not worth it.
We think an internal HIVE based system would make most sense right now.
FOCUS FOR FUTURE
In the meantime we would like to focus on an increase of viewership (we'd love to see communities get many multiples of what they are getting now and hope we can be a big part of helping that happen) and like mentioned previously an improvement of the internal Hive based ad bid system. Perhaps encouragement to develop something that can be used by many other interfaces.
I think ads can put some people off and many will block them anyway. Maybe if/when Hive is much bigger then it could be more viable. Have to avoid annoying users though.
I think that this test was useful to see certain parameters that can be improved and how we can attract other people's attention through other strategies. While it is not a resounding "never" to ADS, neither is it to give up what we want, and thus to achieve stability, growth and well-being for all ☺️ We continue working 👍
Any ecosystem that can sustain itself without ads is a place I'd like to spend my money.
where do you find yourself spending money on Hive?
I used to spend on Splinterlands, but they changed significantly and I pulled out. Now I just drop spare change into HBD
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 41/51) Liquid rewards.
Right decision. I don't think HIVE should focus on ads at all until the daily active user base is far larger.
With ads, the experience is never good and thanks for removing this. Great work
to be honest they didn't bother me because it was not aggressive. one thing that was irritating was the one that always moving my page :D
Sad that its wasnt more successful. Glad you tested anyways 👍
Although I definitely get it that you try to implement ads as they generate money, I am glad you dismissed them (for now). It made it less attractive and kind of annoying.
Great that you tested it out though!
It's not a surprise at all, considering the target audience as you mentioned :)
Perhaps there could be community based adds for better targeting, but yet again, most of the users/readers would be from all over the globe, and likely from low ad revenue countries.
We need better content recommendation algorithms.
Once it's done, we can revisit old blogs and generate traffic instead of current content graveyard.
When we r not generating views on old content, google might not be ranking us thinking hive.blog or peakd.com is a website where people spam and then the content is thrown in a graveyard like most social media where posts r hard to rank on search engines.
Hive should try to be wordpress and not Facebook.
The fact you tested it is a success. Hive dapps need to be doing things like this.
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STOPI know you guys need to make money. But please, don't let Google and the sort track us down even on on Hive. The absence of add with trackers is one of the main reasons I came here and I stayed. I hope you can find better ways to generate revenues...
I guess good thing we turned them off :)
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