Making money

When I first started this blog, I decided to start running Google advertising on it, mainly as an experiment for me to find out how it all worked in practise than with any aspirations to be the next Rupert Murdoch. Apart from anything else, the fact that I purposefully keep the existence of this blog reasonably quiet sort of stands in the way of significant traffic. Anyone who's stalking me will notice I've removed this blog from my profile, so I can promote my other blog without worrying about traffic spilling over onto this one. I'd like to be able to be as frank and honest as possible on this one, without worrying about who's reading it.

On Eating Auckland though, I actively promote it using things like Twitter, Facebook, Google and good ol' word of mouth, and traffic is picking up. One of the things I've found interesting recently is the way much more traffic than I expected is coming through feed readers, such as Google Reader. During April, I've had about 400 page impressions, and around 100 feed impressions; basically this more or less means about 20% of my audience don't tend to visit the site at all. Fortunately I use Feedburner to advertise within feeds, and peculiarly get a very good result from that.

The thing about this statistic is how it, in microcosm, outlines a changing behaviour pattern in media consumption in general. Apart from my daily visits to the Guardian website, all the news I consume comes through either Google Reader or Newsstand (on the iPod Touch). This means I'm reading articles without actually visiting any of the sites I use, so I'm not viewing any advertising on those sites. An online publisher is paid per ad displayed, effectively, so by the numbers I'm seeing, a fifth of potential revenue is being lost by users managing their own news consumption in this way.

What's weird is that, in all the feeds I consume, my feeds are the only ones with adverts in. Am I the only one who's worked this out?

Finally, to those of you who use ad-blocking tools, what you're doing is effectively theft, and to do so displays either astonishing ignorance or just plain unpleasantness. Please stop it.