Thanks, C-rats - I appreciate your comments. I'm familiar with how ar15.com sells memberships but it's not something I'm a big fan of. When it comes to these forums, you guys contribute as much (if not more!) of the content than I do so I can't see how I could charge you a membership fee and still be able to look myself in a mirror.
But maybe you'll be happy to know that mreinfo.com is now at least somewhat self-funding (as opposed to being a fund-sucker, which it was for the first 5 years).
Back in February, I signed up for Google's AdSense and started running some of their ads on a few pages on the website (main page, buying mres, and a few others). I didn't want to plaster the site with ads and since AdSense ads are technically supposed to be targeted to the content of the site, I thought they might even be a little useful while providing some relief to the cost of running the site.
And sure enough, the modest bit of return I get from the ads definitely covers the cost of the site and makes it easier for me to buy up new MREs for taste testing and evaluating.
You might be interested in how the ads work...and I never knew this before I started hosting them. Apparently, you get revenue from two things - ad impressions (how many times they're displayed) and clicks. Ad impressions don't generate very much unless you have tens or hundreds of thousands of page hits per day, which we don't.
But the ad clicks are the fun stuff. The rates are variable and Google threatens to shoot you if you disclose any actual numbers so I'll make something up for an example. Say there's an ad spot - one advertiser bids against other advertisers for a place on your site. The highest bidders get the best-placed ads. So let's say XYZ wants an ad on the site and they've bid $0.25 per click. If they're the higest bidder, their ad gets top position and the lower bids go below it. If someone clicks on their ad, the advertiser pays Google $0.25. Google then turns around and pays the site operator some percentage of that. Again, that percentage varies but let's say it comes out to $0.05 per click. Some ads could be lots more, some could be lots less. There's just no telling - it depends on your niche and how much advertisers are willing to pay.
In all my web surfing previously, I never realized that this was how the ads worked - I always figured they were just irritating ad banners that I usually completely ignored. But based on the traffic I've seen on the ads placed on the site, it looks like some people do find them useful because they do click on things. I have had one visitor complain that he clicked on a ad that took him to a page that wanted him to sign up for a free hat or bag or something and he felt like it was a scam...so I blocked that advertiser. But for the most part, the ads I see up there seem to point to legitimate places like Long Life Foods, The Epicenter, MREStar, etc.
You see a lot of sites that have text that says "Be sure to support our sponsors", which is a sly way of saying "click on our ads", which is something that Google tells you not to do on pain of losing your account. And I would support that. As much as I would love to everyone to sit down and click on ads for hours on end, every click causes a vendor - and probably a vendor I like - to have to pay money to Google. If it's a legitimate interest, then great, that kind of support is good, but I really only want to drive valid traffic to their sites.
So there you go...my diatribe on advertising and all that. Again, I appreciate the idea about the memberships but the limited advertising I have here now is doing the job. It keeps the site running but still isn't enough for my $1200 plane ticket to Romania or enough to even let me dreaming of doing this full time. Oh well...you gotta have something to shoot for, I say.
(or two) there that you can use?
