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NO MORE ADS June 05, 2009
(Comment over at Hacker News) The purpose of the StatSheet Network is pretty simple. I want to do interesting things with sports stats on the web. My goal is also straightforward: to create the most popular sports-related websites and web applications. Placing advertising on StatSheet does not support my purpose or my goal. It actually runs counter to both. Based on this simple logic, I'm in the process of removing every bit of advertising from the StatSheet Network properties (including statsheet.com). Let's face it, no one likes to see ads on websites. They take away from form, functionality, or both! And that was the case on StatSheet. While I didn't plaster ads across the network, I did put a large banner ad at the top of every page. There is a sad truth to web advertising. Unless you are 1) willing to put a half dozen ad units on every page and 2) serving tens of millions of page views per month, advertising will not help that much when it comes to paying a startup's bills (even a lean startup like StatSheet). You can't really dip your toe into the advertising pool to see how it goes. If you want to make decent money, you have to go all in. And I'm not prepared to do that. A driving force behind StatSheet is to create the best user experience for consuming sports content on the web. Fortunately, that's pretty easy to do in the sports space because most sports sites either suck from a usability perspective or are littered with advertising. I can easily differentiate StatSheet by not showing any ads. None of the big sports media websites (ESPN, Yahoo!, etc) could get away with that. This is another aspect that makes it hard to compete with StatSheet. But how will I pay the bills? The "no ads" lightbulb went off for me when I discovered a new business model that could potentially be pretty significant, which I'll write about in a future post. Instead of placing ads for some other company's services on StatSheet, I'll put highly targeted blurbs about the StatSheet subscription service. The goal won't be to hope a bunch of people click on a Google ad (and therefore leave StatSheet), but they'll click on the link that describes more about the StatSheet subscription offering. Does this mean I'll never put outside ads on StatSheet again? Never say never. If I get enough page views consistently where the economics of advertising makes sense and I need additional revenue to supplement my other business models, I'd consider it. But I'd likely employ "sponsored" spots instead of Google Adsense type advertising. Since I pulled down the ads, the StatSheet sites are already looking better to me. It's amazing how much cleaner a no-ads site looks compared to its ad-filled counterpart. Here are a few recent articles and videos about how advertising is losing favor in the startup world:
Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments Discuss this Blog Post
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