Ok so your page RPM and Impression Rpm are very low. That doesn’t help but impression from our experience is key.
What I’ve found is our page RPM and impressions RPM has gone up since move to Discourse but the impressions have collapsed. Click are down a bit but not as much as impressions.
Red = Page Views
Yellow = Impressions
Pg RPM = Purple
Imp RPM = Blue
.
You can see the point where red/yellow hit the floor, and it hasn’t improved over time. It’s a big problem.
Perhaps we’ll try the other plugin but the only other option that we can see is to migrate to another platform.
You can see here, the Revenue pattern, Before / After Discourse, it’s not hard to tell.
Discourse is a great platform but if like many forums you rely on revenue to pay for maybe the cost to keep a labour of love alive, or actually make a living income from your online forum or website, then you should think very hard before you migrate to Discourse (or any platform for that matter!) until you have tested or are sure you are not going to see a 50-80% drop in your income.
We didn’t really come across this subject until too late, thus post this as a cautionary tale.
We don’t know what it is exactly that causes the problem yet, it’s been suggest it something to do with how discourse server up the pages, but nothing more specific than that!
Time has not solved it, even as user engagement and new signup is all trending in the right direction. Even if you loose 10-15% of your traffic it shouldn’t equate to 50-80% drop in revenue, should it? How then if so?
Yes there are also google whims but in this instance you can clear see the switch over point.
It’s night and day.