We quietly turned off ads on PeakD.com a little while back and we meant to say something about it.
It's been quite a bit of time since we turned off ads however we had a few people ask so it's worth sharing a post about the experience.
Here's our post as to why we believed the ad system wasn't worth the inconvenience to the viewers. ADs was not meant to be a revenue generator for PeakD itself but hoped it would benefit all of Hive and the bought and burned Hive would help the ecosystem. We feel there is more benefit to Hive having an AD free PeakD. If the revenues were larger that would have been an easier decision, however they weren't so it was a pretty easy decision. In short... the ad system never generated even more than the labor-cost to develop it.
CHALLENGES
We knew there was a bunch of things stacked up against us for ads on PeakD.com
- Majority of visitors on mobile
- Majority of visitors from low ad revenue countries
- No strong central theme to connect to a certain theme of ads
- A good amount of our own users use Brave or ad blockers
We could have done things to improve number of ad impressions... however the value per ad (CPM) just wasn't great.
Yes we used Google Adsense which is historically one of the lower paying options however we figured it would give us a good idea. In fact we worked with a team that helped us make a bunch of changes to our implementation to improve the system. Yes it was making money but it just wasn't worth it to the community. Yes we could have continued to tweak it and improve the CPM however it had a long way to go to be at the point we figured would be useful.
There weren't a lot of impressions and we could have worked to figure that out even if a good chunk of visitors go to communities these days or feeds (where we didn't put ads) and we could have added ads to more pages but even so if we had increased those impressions the CPM just wasn't going to be useful.
NEVER ADS?
We think there is a place for ads. In fact our own ad bid system on PeakD has continued to be used plenty over the years and could deserve more attention and imporvements and likely could have more impact than something like Adsense. As far as AD networks we know they would perform better when the ad fits in better with content. They would likely fit in better with large communities... when communities or particular pages start to get thousands of views each day it would be worth looking into with some partnership with the communities.
So in short... we are not against ads. And we won't say NEVER... however right now it's for sure not worth it.
We think an internal HIVE based system would make most sense right now.
FOCUS FOR FUTURE
In the meantime we would like to focus on an increase of viewership (we'd love to see communities get many multiples of what they are getting now and hope we can be a big part of helping that happen) and like mentioned previously an improvement of the internal Hive based ad bid system. Perhaps encouragement to develop something that can be used by many other interfaces.