Tag Archive for 'ad_revenue'

Michael Arrington Podcast

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/11/2005
in Blogging, Podcast and RSS
. 7 Comments

As I mentioned previously, I interviewed Michael Arrington of TechCrunch last week as part of my ongoing series of recorded and podcast phone interviews. Michael really impressed me in the interview with his humour, his obvious intelligence and his humility.

This is definitely one of the most stimulating interviews I have recorded yet - despite stiff competition from Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and TJ McIntyre.

These are the questions I asked Michael and the times in the interview they were asked:

  • Michael, for anyone who is not familiar with your name can you start off by telling the listeners who is Michael Arrington? What is it that you do? - 0:15
  • How long has TechCrunch been running now? - 3:58
  • I was interviewing Robert Scoble last week and he said he’d never heard of TechCrunch 6 months ago - now it is the first site he looks at every day - 4:09
  • Feedburner reports Techcrunch has 15020 subscribers - to what do you attribute the success of techcrunch - 4:46?
  • Since TechCrunch is a success you must be really busy, is it a full-time job? - 7:29
  • You don’t have ads on the site - how do you fund it? - 9:32
  • You have recently joined John Battelle’s Federated Media Publishing - can you explain what that is and how do you see this changing TechCrunch? - 11:46
  • How is it different from Google’s AdWords? - 12:54
  • What’s the story with the BBQs? how did that tradition get started? - 13:13
  • TechCrunch is part of the Web 2.0 Workgroup - What is the web 2.0 workgroup? - 15:50
  • What is Web 2.0? Is it just another catchall buzzword like ‘interactive’ designed to grab the attention of vc’s? - 17:14
  • What web 2.0 app(s) could you not live without? 19:56
  • Ad supported sites seem to be becoming the norm - is everything headed that way? do you think we will one day see an online version of Office/Windows supported by ad revenue? - 21:27
  • Are you a Mac or PC user? - 23:27
  • What kind of world do you want your kids to grow up in? - 27:27

The full interview is 29 minutes and you can listen to the interview here (6.6mb mp3).

Do Google Ads make cents?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 6/10/2005
in Blogging, Business blogging and Technology
. 23 Comments

I have finally added Google Ads to this site. Why? Well, when I hear that Jason Calacanis just sold his company for $25-$35m on Google Ad revenues of $1m annually, I decided I need to try doing something similar! So I figure, if I can get $100,000 Google Ad revenue, I’ll be able to sell for $2.5m - Wohooo! I’m gonna be rich, rich I tell ya!

No seriously, I have added the ads to the site to offset some of the hosting costs. The ads themselves I have tried to keep subtle using a 468 x 60 text only banner and I’m keeping the text colour the same as the colour of the posts. This I am doing in order that the ads don’t distract from the posts. However, there is always the view that by doing this, no-one will ever click on the ads because they are too subtle!

Obviously, if you read this site in your rss reader - this is a moot point! Still, I’d like people’s opinions on this, is it better (from an earnings point of view) to have the ads loud, garish and in the readers face (say it ain’t so), or is the muted approach more likely to succeed?

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