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Been receiving inquiries lately from companies interested in buying the site (most recently this one .. you can turn off the music by clicking the speaker, top-left of page). I'm not interested in selling the site. (It's my therapy.) But I *am* interested in how much they figure it's worth, which I'm sure is directly related to how much they figure it can earn. (I did learn a few things in Economics class.) And I can be bought .. for the right price. (I'm a capitalist at heart.) But I doubt they can afford me. ••• continued ••• Many Rad readers have invested in Google stock. So they're familiar with the outlook for Google's profitability, and that of other companies which generate revenue by selling ads. These readers periodically send me links to articles discussing the outlook for online ads. Back when the dot-com bubble burst, a few years ago, ad revenue went down the toilet. Thousands of sites disappeared, including many good ones. But Radified remained unaffected, since we only recently started running ads. But articles I've been reading say ad revenue is making a comeback, because it has demonstrated tangible results (increased sales) for its sponsors. Consequently, more companies continue to allocate a larger portion of the advertising budget to online ads. At least, that's what I'm hearing. In other words, the outlook is bright. Speaking of ads, yesterday the site set a new record for number of clicks. The revenue wasn't particularly great (since different ads pay different amount$), but it's still encouraging to see the numbers continuing to climb. (The Google agreement stipulates I'm not supposed to share numbers, otherwise I would.) Some of these companies which are interested in purchasing the site, say they also would consider hiring me to continue to run it. That might be cool, but I'm sure it would cramp my style. Right now I answer to no one. And again, I doubt they can afford what my ego would require. Friends tell me there are many things I can do to increase revenue. For example they say my pages are too long. Google only lets you code 3 ads per page. Consequently, many of my web pages contain extended sections with no visible ads. My web-guru buddies say this is bad for revenue. For example, look at the first page of the Guide to Ripping & Encoding CD audio. Notice how you can't see any ads the second half of the page (except for the very end). And the *guides* are what generate the vast majority of the revenue for the site. I will eventually break up some of the longer pages into smaller ones. When I did that with the Ghost guide recently (from 9 to 15 pages), ad revenue from that feature jumped proportionately. But it's more time-consuming than it might look. And it's not much fun, either. No creativity involved. All drudgery. So I'm in no big hurry. They also claim I'm crazy to offer PDF versions of the guides, because people will download the PDF (which contain no ads) and never be able to click any online ads (Google only pays for *clicks*, not mere page impressions.) Anyway, from what I'm hearing, it seems like now is a good time to buy quality sites, and as you know, none offers more quality (and originality) than Radified. =) |
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