Sunday, February 25, 2007 at 12:12:13 AM
I'd like to take a few minutes to thank all of you who took the time to fill out the Search Kindly survey. From this site alone, we received 169 responses, which should definitely yield some solid data. As I said at the end of the survey, I will be very glad to share the results with anyone interested--I just need a bit more time to compile the results. I'm hoping that I might have some intelligible numbers within the next three weeks.
Another thing that you might have noticed over the past few days was the text ads that we experimented with. One complaint that I received had to do with the lag-time that the animated advertisements were creating. The idea was that if we switched those ads with really simple and fast-loading text-ads, then the lag-time would disappear. Hmm, I don't know exactly how short the lag-time got, but I do know that those text-ads didn't raise hardly any money. In percentage-terms, they made about 25% as much as the animated one. Not good.
At some point, I'd really love to take those animated ads down and work with only simple, static ones. But in order for us to be able to dictate those terms to advertisers, we've got to be able to generate some serious traffic. Unfortunately, we just aren't there yet. That's not to say that we aren't growing on a daily basis, it's just that we're not a million-pageview website just yet. Someday...
And speaking of someday, the goal is to have advertisers contact us directly for ad-space. But the beautiful, win-win situation will be that they will simply give us a tax-deductible donation and we will make sure that their ad is shown for the entire day...or something like that. In the time being, however, we're stuck with the really flashy animated ads.
Last but not least, I'd like to encourage the use of two things here:
1. The Comment Wall--that's not to say that I dislike personal emails. It's just that if a comment is posted on the wall, and then I respond to it, then everyone can see/learn about something that may have been on their mind at some point.
2. Buy Kindly--it's pretty rudimentary right now, but the gist of it is in place. The idea is almost identical to that of Search Kindly; if you're going to buy, why not Buy Kindly? If you're planning on buying from any of the stores that are on our list, all you have to do is click on our link to their site. What happens next is the magic of the Internet and Voila!...we get paid. It's usually something like a 5% commission.
Ok...bye.
