Hey dudes,
I’ll start with what’s most relevant to you, Mr. Blog Reader. If you’ve been on the fence about setting up a full subscription to seekBromance, this is a perfect time to get started. Does this imply that I’m threatening to raise the rates? No, at least not immediately. If you want the back story, read on.
Like almost every online business, seekBromance spends a major portion of its ad budget on Google’s AdWords service. Recently, I did a routine check to see if the bids on any of our ads needed to be tweaked, and I was surprised to discover that the ads hadn’t been showing on the network – at all. Obviously I did some digging, and I found out that the site’s ads were suspended for violating Google’s arbitrage policy. To be specific, what set off Google’s spiders was the fact that the total ad space on some pages was bigger than the page’s content.
I’m not upset with Google about this. You wouldn’t want an ad to direct you to a page that had so many ads of its own that you couldn’t concentrate on the content. (We’ve all seen those.) On the other hand, as I’ve mentioned in other blogs, seekBromance carries ads so that we can keep the subscription prices as low as possible. So it was time for a trade-off.
To bring seekBromance back into line, I had to make cuts in both the number and the sizes of many of the site’s ads. Will this reduce the amount of ad revenue by only a little, or by a lot? I don’t know. I’ll have to run the new format for at least a couple of months before I get a clear picture. And if the revenue drop-off isn’t huge – let’s keep our fingers crossed for this – then I won’t have to raise subscription prices.
Now do you see why it would be a great idea not to wait to subscribe?
Okay, that’s all I’m going to say about subscription prices for a while. In the meantime, keep on enjoying your summer, and happy bromancing!
Later,
-The Blog Dude
