A new way of doing text ads on LWN.net

Why move away from CPM? Simply put, selling text ads on a CPM basis is a flawed approach toward advertising. The CPM route causes the media company (in this case, LWN) to decide on a pricing structure and then sell the ads under that structure. Since February, LWN has been selling text ads for $4 per thousand.

The result is that about 20% of the total impressions on LWN are "sold" and the other 80% are not. That's 80% wasted real estate that is not being used. That harms LWN, the advertisers, and the readers who rely on LWN for their news and information. Why not make use of that 80%? We're not using it, and the advertisers who support LWN could.

So, starting late last week, we have completely changed our text ad structure, and this note is to introduce those changes to our audience.

What's the change?

As of Friday, advertising campaigns on LWN are no longer pre-purchased with a set impression amount. Instead, the advertiser is purchasing an actual percentage of all traffic on LWN.net. Consider this case:

Suppose that we had a total of $900 of monthly income. You want your company's advertisements on LWN, so you purchase a $100 monthly campaign. Your ad would then be shown on about 10% of all pages on LWN. Out of about 3 million impressions, you would receive about 300,000 impressions. Additionally, out of about 380,000 unique visitors to the site each month, your ad would be seen by about 38,000 people.

Not bad for a hundred bucks.

Why a percentage?

It's the best way to do it. I (Dave, the Director of Business Development at LWN) am of the opinion that web advertising has been flawed since the beginning. Take print advertising, for example. When you take an advertisement out with, say, our friends at Linux Journal, you know that your ad will appear in front of every single person who reads that magazine and happens to flip to the page containing your ad. You know the circulation rates of the publication, so you can extrapolate a good idea of how many potential customers will see your message. Not so with CPM-based web advertising, where you pay $100 for 25,000 impressions, and you just hope that those 25,000 impressions happen to be shown, by luck, to those people looking for your goods and services.

Using a percentage-based system is the only fair way to sell advertisements on the web, and this is how LWN will be doing it from now on. The value of the web pages on our site will be determined on a day-to-day basis by our advertisers and what they are willing to pay.

Some real data:

As of today, we have 11 campaigns running on LWN, with a total purchase amount of $557.

To get started with your own campaign, visit our Media Kit or go straight to our automated text ad management page. If you have any extra questions, please feel free to e-mail us or leave a comment right here on this page.