Let’s take another step back and look at online ad revenue.
Online ad revenue is primarily of three types, CPA, CPM, and CPC. Each of these models have different characteristics.
Let’s assume you are talking about Google Adsense CPC display advertising.
CPC revenue will be realized by this simple forumula:
Total Ad Revenue = Total Ad Clicks = Total Ad Impressions * Click Through Rate (CTR)
So, let
- TAR = Total Ad Revenue
- TAC = Total Ad Clicks
- TAI = Total Ad Impressions
- CTR = Click Though Rate
Then, obviously:
TAR = TAI * CTR
If your TAR has changed, either your TAI or CTR (or both) have changed.
What are the possible causes of each?
Total Ad Impressions (TAI)
There are many reasons for TAI to fall:
- Total traffic to the site (page views) has decreased.
- Total ads per page have decreased.
- Other factors (this is not meant to be a exhaustive bullet list)
Notes on TAI:
Search engine referrals are a primary driver of revenue for many, but not all sites. You must compare your search engine referrals between various sites to determine which web site has better SEO. There are more opinions on this topic than we can imagine, and many are just pure speculation, and every site is different; so it’s best to just look at your own numbers (traffic stats). The same is true for total ad impressions, in general.
Click Though Rate (CTR)
There are many reasons for CTR to fall:
- The ads being served are not interesting to the users (ad context issues).
- Total view-ability of ads has decreased (based on placements, scrolling, etc).
- Users are engaged with the content and not interested in clicking on ads.
- Other factors (this is not meant to be an exhaustive list or discussion)
Summary
It’s not really possible to answer the question of:
"Why are some people reporting this “ad revenue drop” with discourse compared to a “page forum” ?
… unless “some people” (whomever they are) provide detailed site-to-site statistical comparisons of CTR and TAI for various forum software and ad traffic models and stats. However , in closing, here are some general possibilities:
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Sites with infinite scrolling might have less overall pages in the search engine indexes. However, I do not have enough data to say either way. It could be the opposite, I simple do not know (yet). There are discussions about this on the net and can be found from search analysis.
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Sites driven by javascript may be indexed differently by various search engines, since each search engine spider / bot handles javascript differently. Some have speculated that long infinite scrolling pages are not as fully indexed compared to the shorter “pages” model, because (speculation by others) is that search engines are not designed to “scroll” like humans and so therefore, the pages are indexed differently. Personally, I do not know the answer to this, but many discuss this on the Internet and there are many opinions about this. You can search and read them.
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Sites which are more fun and engaging, like some Discourse sites, may have less CTR because users do not want to click on display ads and just “scroll past them” and engage with the great forum and wonderful content. Anything is possible. CTR stats and analysis will help answer these types of questions.
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Other possibilities, but this is not meant to be a full study into this topic.
Brief Conclusion
Each web site must look at their own traffic statistics to determine what is going on with their site(s). You can study your traffic and overall page impressions using Google Analytics; and you can study how many ad impressions you are getting and the CTR with each ad network. If you run you own ad server, you can look at those statistics.
In general, many people have speculated over the years that javascript driven sites which are based on the single-page-request model have lower SEO than their counterparts. There are many discussions about this on the Internet and are not germane to Discourse, per se; but apply to all javascript framework driven sites and their SEO characteristics.
Finally
I hope my test page I tossed up a few days ago helped a few people, in some small way, to understand that there is no problem with iframe-based ad tags being loaded in a Discourse topic. This test page will be “torn down” tomorrow as I need to use that VPS slice for another task. Note: That test page did not address async javascript tags.
Also, hope the short summary above, which is not meant to be exhaustive nor complete, on a few aspects of how and why CTR-based ad revenue can “fall” was useful; and kindly forgive me if I drop off this discussion for now. Hopefully, this “bird’s eye view” was helpful to one or two of you in some small way.
And people with this problem should indeed look at all these aspects and maybe provide them here if they want to discuss that subject further.