The Most Generous Website Viewers
So, you have your very own little website up and running. There's even a few articles on there, accompanied with ads. I mean, who doesn't want some of that internet money everyone is talking about? However, have you ever wondered who actually clicks on those ads? And where they come from? Are they from social news sites like digg™ or reddit; or, are they from professional blogs like Wired and Gizmodo? Well, using evidence from my site's traffic a few weeks ago, lets find out!
A couple weeks ago, I wrote an article about our previous neighbor stealing Netflix™ DVDs from our mailbox. The article proved to be quite a success, first getting posted on the site hackingnetflix and the next day the story received quite some success reaching the front page of reddit. Then, that friday afternoon, the article made the front page of digg™ and even more viewers came. Finally, the article got posted on Wired's Gadget Lab that Sunday night and Gizmodo the next morning.
Luckily enough, the article was posted on all of these sites on separate days. So, using the stats tracking software JoomlaWatch, I was able to record the number of unique visitors on each given day.
After gathering all of this visitor data, I logged into Google Adsense to view the daily reports of ads for the week of the article's popularity. I then copied down the number of ads displayed in a day, and of those ads displayed; how many were actually clicked. The graph below shows ratio of ads clicked to ads shown.
The results are actually quite interesting: It would seem like visitors from Gizmodo and Wired are either very gulliable and think they can win that free ipod, or they have a genuine support for website owners.