It's subject to change based on demand. However, I think there is something unique and compelling about being on every page for a period of time, which warrants higher rates. Also, the current discounted rate is $2.96CPM.
The search engine is private, so it's hard to tell demographics. But I'm pretty sure the user base is generally highly technical and highly educated. This also warrants higher rates.
And I could make an argument that your userbase is more likely to ignore/block ads (although my guess is that you're serving the ad itself, so AdBlock wouldn't work).
I've had a fair amount of experience experimenting with all sorts of online marketing techniques, and it's just an awfully costly experiment to shell out $1,500 for a week. If you had a Reddit-style minimum of $20, then the CPM wouldn't be a complete non-starter for an experiment, but that's a very, very high bar.
Of course, you have a pretty rabid fanbase, so early advertisers are probably going to get a higher-than-average CTR because users are going to want to support you with their clicks, but that's just going to end up artificially depressing advertisers' conversion rates, which DDG won't have any insight into.
So, I guess all I'm saying is 1) consider lowering your rate and 2) consider dramatically lowering your minimum.
Remember, kids, AdWords are a gateway drug to unprofitable user acquisition.
Points taken. I also do a lot of online advertising experiments, and so I know exactly where you are coming from.
Really it's more that I just don't want to spend a lot of time on this right now, as I know the reddit team has. Ideally I'd love to syndicate either the deck network, reddit, or someone similar, though no good options seem available to me atm.
Great point-- I imagine this is quicker for him that an adwords clone, which might require some clickfraud protection, self-serve flow, payment processing, etc. AFAIK, the OP is just one person... I recall reading a study about who clicks on ads, and the OP's demographic is decidedly not it. You can play the "pay per click" game if your audience clicks. Otherwise, he might have better luck with the "pay per influence" stuff that The Deck does.
To the OP: a question regarding your stats page. Would you be willing to post more stats? Specifically, I'd love to know how many uniques visit more than 10x per month. In other words, how many people are using you as a primary search engine in their life?
You're right--I'm focused on improving search results right now.
As for stats, I don't have those as I don't store IPs (http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html & http://ye.gg/ddgp). I do know that before the switch (to no IPs) I had about ~500K page views and ~150K uniques, so scaling that up I'd estimate 360K uniques (worldwide, i.e. compete.com is just US). I still don't know how many are 10x/month, but obviously much lower.
Isn't this almost what DDG is avoiding? That would just violate the less spam and ads point. Unless you kept it to say one ad per search term or something.
It can also be targeted down to the tag though which makes it worth much more, you usually see people advertising on Ruby, .NET, SQL, etc. and not on the main site.
Try to get in to CPC right away, CPM is not very useful unless you are targeting a specific niche.
$0.05 to $0.10 should get you some traction, evaluate at the end of the first period with your advertiser if they got value for their money. It should be a win-win if you expect it to become a steady money supply otherwise you'll just be hopping from advertiser to advertiser. Ideally you want your first advertiser to be jumping up and down to be allowed to sign up for all ads for the rest of the year based on that first month :)
This is just a stop-gap measure to get some income before you implement context-sensitive ads, right? Most advertisers won't get any value from most searches.
I think the traffic is still too low to offer a unique context-sensitive ads approach. So this is an experiment for now. I believe this exclusive approach offers a unique branding experience, but we'll see :)
What does that mean exactly. Are you talking about the no click stuff, or do you mean that DDG isn't crawling the web and indexing it, but using results from other search engines to build its own?
I've always liked the Daring Fireball approach to advertising (not sure if he should get credit for it, but he was the first one I saw doing it), and I really hope it works out well for you, Gabriel.
Sorry knee-jerk reply. Daring Fireball has multiple lucrative revenue streams.
I wonder what kind of metrics DDG will offer - I think it would be interesting to know what the user was searching for when there is a click through on the sole sponsor banner.
Hrm, you can't trust aws stats. In my opinion they are frequently over-reporting traffic. I recommend using a JavaScript based logger such as Google Analytics or Site Catalyst if you want better numbers.
