Coding Away

I’d like to share some numbers that I gathered during a little experiment I just ran regarding the effectiveness of on-line advertisement targeted to the Software Developer’s community compared to other niches. This article obviously doesn’t represent an exhaustive research. It is just the report of one single experiment that provides very interesting results.

As you can probably imagine, on the Internet there is a great deal of traffic generated by developers and geeks surfing for information or cool stuff. That’s not hard to believe considering how much time developers spend in front of a connected computer, and given that the Internet is possibly the only “book” they really need (well, a book full of amazing errors and faulty opinions, but still a pretty good book if you know what to look for).

Anyway, I have several Blogs that I maintain, this one being the last one I opened. To pay my hosting bills I usually put some light Google Adsense ads which is usually just enough to pay for the hosting expenses. I do not care of making money with ads, but I like the idea of not having to pay for providing a service to my readers. AdSense allows me to at least Blog without having to pay for it but still choose a domain name and retain full control on the site, configuration, software, etc.

To verify something that I really already knew, I ran a little side-by-side experiment using two articles that I was going to publish anyway. One I published on this Blog a couple of days ago, and one published on a different Blog with a very different type of readership.

The article on this Blog was about an algorithm to find loops in a linked list. The topic is obviously targeted to software developers. It gained some interest in the active on-line development community and ended up on the main page of programming.reddit.com for a couple of days, receiving about 3,000 hits / day, most of them being unique visitors. On the article I placed a small Google ad at the very beginning.

The other article was on a completely different subject: dream interpretation and sleep patterns. Yeah, I have many interests in different areas The ”dreams” article also featured a Google ad placed in the exact same area as the linked list one. I guess people like to sleep because it received very much interest and traffic. It was positively reviewed and linked by a very well known MD offering on-line health advice, and received just about ~3,500 hits / day, most of them from unique visitors.

The lucky part was to receive a very similar amount of traffic on two completely different articles. In both cases the traffic started abruptly due to a link, and in both cases the article featured a very similar ad size and placement. To be noted that the coloring of the Blogs, the contrast between article and ad and everything else are also very similar.

How much do you think each ad campaign generated with traffic of about 3,000 hits/day?
Take a quick guess!

The article about dream interpretation and sleep patterns generated about $10.00, with a click ratio of about ~3.5%.

Are you ready? The article on linked lists generated 1 single click (yes, ONE), which is the equivalent of a few cents, or pretty much 0% click ratio.

I knew that as a group we (developers) are pretty difficult customers, but I didn’t think it was that bad! If you are a developer, you may find these results obvious. However, I ensure you that most people, especially marketing and business folks, do not understand developer’s psychology very much.

My suggestion for the reader is: if you are really thinking of generating revenue with on-line ad campaigns targeted to developers, do some research! You may change your mind In fact, I almost guarantee that you will.