Ads on Chart Porn
16 Dec 2010With some regret, I am going to start experimenting with ads on Chart Porn. The blog’s success has increased bandwidth use by more than 400% in the past year, while the donation box has gone largely unused. Handling this level of demand (and future growth) has forced me to look into funding options. I will try to keep the ads as un-obnoxious as possible. Feel free to complain, scream, and shout about me being a sell-out, if the urge strikes you.
On the other hand, lingering guilt from doing this will likely motivate me to work harder and make further improvements to the site.
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17 Responses to Ads on Chart Porn
Nathan
December 16th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
That’s totally fine, I think! It’s great that you’ve started getting a lot more attention, I think as long as the ads aren’t too intrusive and don’t interfere with the content then there’s no problem.
Michaela
December 16th, 2010 at 8:15 pm
First, are you Catholic (I get a lot of that question when I show my guilt side)? Second, Don’t be (guilty that is). Thanks for your efforts. Third, I hope I’m part of your traffic surge. I’ve forwarded to lots of folks because it’s great stuff. An last, thanks for your efforts.
Randall
December 16th, 2010 at 8:18 pm
Welcome to the dark side.
Ads are a tricky business, and in a field like this difficult to target. I wish you the best of luck, and I’ll be happy to help if I can. Have you decided if you’re going to go with something easy like Google Adsense or try to sell your own?
If you’re interested in joining the VizWorld network, let me know
Rachel
December 16th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
Same from me – congratulations on the increased traffic, I love your site – advertising makes no difference to me (not too keen on flashing, singing, pop ups, but other than that…).
David
December 16th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
I block ads, so I just gave you a donation. My only request is that you don’t suppress the content of the post from the RSS feed. I tend to stop reading blogs when they do that (I’m looking at you, Freakonomics!).
Russ
December 16th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Bandwidth isn’t free. Ads are better than charging for content. Although if you charged $.25/post I’d be curious to see the results in terms of lost traffic and decreased bandwidth use.
Maria Popova
December 16th, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Dustin, love (LOVE) ChartPorn and no amount of ads will change that – as a fellow publisher who bootstraps massive amounts of traffic (on Brain Pickings), I say do what you gotta do to keep the site strong.
@David – same here re: RSS scrooges. But there’s a nice little service called WizardRSS that actually sidesteps the cut-off and lets you read truncated feeds in full. I use it on everything from PSFK to, yes, Freakonomics. Check it out.
Scott
December 17th, 2010 at 12:30 am
That spike in bandwidth is about when I started reading… I hope it’s not all me! But seriously, what Rachel said. As long as they don’t make noise or expand out of the ad to cover the content, ads are no problem.
Also, I tend to ignore sidebars, and I assume other people do too. If you included a request to donate on each post, even something as small as a line of text after the post but before the comments, I bet you’d get more donations.
Darcy
December 17th, 2010 at 10:19 am
yeah, i can handle a bit of advertising, chart porn rocks!
Jack Lucky
December 17th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Cool! All the best… like Scott said.. try change donate/ads position (away from sidebar)
palvar
December 17th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Definitely go for it. I just turned off my ad blocker too.
Olof
December 18th, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Dustin, have you looked at https://flattr.com ? I don’t know how big/small they are, but that might be a way if you don’t want to go down the ad-route. I’m fine with the ads, though
Keep the good work up.
Sun
December 23rd, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Instead of using ads, have you tried A/B testing the donation box and see if it converts better somewhere else… like below your home banner on the left? I like the data on your site, but the name means you’ll turn off a lot of people that find the word ‘porn’ objectionable.
Sun
December 23rd, 2010 at 4:05 pm
Bandwidth is not free, but have the cost of bandwidth actually raised your operating costs? Seems like there’s a plethora of web hosts that provide “unlimited” or at least several terabytes per month which should be enough for a blog web site. I guess I don’t see the connection between increased bandwidth usage and lack of donations. Is it possible your operating expenses continue to be flat, but somehow correlating increased bandwidth as a reason to raise funds? I know you need to raise funds, but its not clear because it is due to increased bandwidth usage?
Dustin
December 23rd, 2010 at 8:51 pm
Sun,
Thanks for the suggestions. A lot of webhosts say “unlimited” or offer multiple terrabytes of bandwidth, but if you try to actually use it, you will run into problems. Of course, it depends how much you want to pay – some of the new “cloud” hosting options are very scalable, for example. The change is also about managing future growth — my costs this year only went up about 20%, but if the growth trend continues, they are going to soon pass my “this is a fun hobby/gift to the community” threshold. So, it’s an experiment. We’ll see what happens in the next few months.
Gregory Goldmaker
December 29th, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Good luck. I hope it works out. Thanks for the work you’re doing.
Dan Rodgers
December 30th, 2010 at 9:58 pm
Hello,
Firstly I love the site and it’s very well done.
I run XDnet.co.uk and may be able to provide a sponsored deal for your hosting, depending on what your specific requirements are we would be looking to offer either free or heavily subsidised hosting, most likely on a virtual platform (which can easily be expanded).
If you are interested and would like to discuss this please hit the live chat on the site or email me direct.
Cheers,
Dan