Posted: Sunday, November 2nd 2008

Recently one of the GU faithful sent me a PM to ask about the impact of ad blockers on GU's revenue stream. This was actually a welcomed change to the usual, as people typically just install ad blockers without thinking about what it could be doing to their favorite sites.

The truth for GU is that over 99% of my revenue comes from ad placement. The other less than 1% is from commissioned work (unrelated to ad sales), t-shirt and store sales. And like I was explaining to the reader, we get advertisers based on our monthly impression totals. The more impressions we have, the larger the companies are that we can successfully pitch our inventory to. So, when we land a client and at the end of the month there is a considerable discrepancy between our page views and our ad impressions it becomes harder to sell them on the space again.

See when a company comes to GU wanting to buy ad inventory, they buy it in impression blocks of 1000 (CPM - cost per thousand) and they usually have a set flight run. Meaning they buy a set number of pageviews within a set amount of time.Ad blockers generate page views without an associated ad impression making it more difficult for us to meet the total sales within the given time period. Before GU moved to Themis, I ended up having to give one client well over 30% more page views than they should have received just to make up for the fact that our numbers weren't matching up. So I didn't hit the target amount within the timeline. I then had to wrestle with them to even get paid. Needless to say they won't be advertising again because it wasn't worth all the extra work.

So yeah, ad blockers slowly cripple GU. And when there's no money coming in, there's no money to pay for the server GU is housed on. The unfortunate part is that folks will read this and not care. They don't won't to be "inconvenienced" by the ads that exist on my site. Despite the fact that I have taken every action I can to make sure the ads we run are relevant, and don't do stupid crap like launch pop up windows or expand over content. But those same people will start firing off emails the second GU drops off the net.

Luckily I'll never have to see those emails because, well, the server that facilitates my ability to check @gucomics.com addresses will be offline. Hooray for coincidental irony.

Submitted by Woody | 19 Comments - last comment by: Zukan