[question]
My site is ad-driven and most of my revenue happens at the site, so while I agree email is important, I’m not sure I should necessarily architect the site to convert visitors into email subscribers. What’s your argument?
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[answer]
Well it does depend upon the market. We have one client who is a B2B publisher, totally ad-driven, and in their case they tell us that about 60 or 70-percent of their revenue is email generated. Their advertisers are much more interested in sponsoring email than they are in sponsoring the website and unsurprisingly when you think about why, if you look at where the page views occur in any given month for a high-frequency email newsletter publisher, they actually will generate more page views in email than they’ll generate back at the website. So because of that online mix of web and email, you can see why the advertisers, in their case, are still biased to wanting email sponsorships.
When you cross over to a bigger website, for example Forbes.com, CEO of the site Jim Spanfeller was very clear that in his case, he is generating 80 to 85-percent of his revenue off of the website; that email is a relatively small component for him. And part of that is how his website traffic comes in. Forbes.com has partnerships with some of the larger portals like AOL and Yahoo!, so for him, the bulk of his impressions are actually occurring at the website, hence the reason his revenue is actually occurring at the site. So it can go either way depending upon who you are and what the advertisers in your market are looking for.
But if you aren’t as big as Forbes.com, or as fortunate to have such fantastic content syndication partnerships, you should be doing everything you can at your site to covert visitors into subscribers, so they have a clear reason to return again and again.
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