rlucas.net: The Next Generation Rotating Header Image

The Paradox of Quality Site Visitors

Last month I met with a friend who complained to me that his website — a high quality hobbyist community site — received X page views per day, but was turning over less than X / 2 dollars per year in revenue. Doing the math, that turns out to under .15 cents per page view.

Exacerbating this, he then cited a conversation he’d had with a domain squatter (domain troll), who also was receiving X page views per day on a network of typo domains and similar. That domain squatter was making more like X * 5 dollars annually — more than ten times as much money as my friend with the valuable, sticky community!

The paradox, it seems is this: in a pay-per-click driven world, site visitors who want to stay on your site — due to it having the once-much-lauded quality of “stickiness” — are worth much less than those who want to flee your site because it’s clearly not valuable, and hence will click through to somewhere else.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • email
  • Faves
  • LinkedIn
  • NewsVine
  • Technorati

4 Comments

  1. [...] the web – Cost per Click (CPC) – rewards exactly the opposite kinds of websites.  As Randall Lucas said in response to one of my earlier posts: The paradox, it seems is this: in a pay-per-click [...]

  2. [...] dominant advertising model on the web – Cost per Click (CPC) – rewards un-sticky websites.  As Randall Lucas said in response to one of my earlier posts: The paradox, it seems is this: in a pay-per-click [...]

  3. [...] advertising model on the web – Cost per Click (CPC) – rewards un-sticky websites.  As Randall Lucas said in response to one of my earlier posts: The paradox, it seems is this: in a pay-per-click [...]

  4. [...] advertising model on the web – Cost per Click (CPC) – rewards un-sticky websites.  As Randall Lucas said in response to one of my earlier posts: The paradox, it seems is this: in a pay-per-click [...]

Leave a Reply