Ad space options and costs
I mainly help increase visibility of your product primarily through ad impressions. An impression occurs when someone loads a page where your ad is visible. In 2018, idratherbewriting.com had an average of 1,552,615 page views, or about 4,250 page views a day. Users created 942,306 sessions, with 1.65 pages per session and an average of 1:44 minutes per session. Analytics are tracked through Google Analytics. More analytics details are provided below in Site traffic analytics for 2018.
You can advertise your product or service on idratherbewriting.com. Different ad spaces are more visible than others. You can select from several different spaces or services:
- Sidebar ad space
- Horizontal inline ad space
- Top banner ad
- Newsletter space
- Inline text blurbs
- Guest posts
The cost for each ad space is as follows:
| Ad space | Size | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|
| Sidebar graphic | 125 x 125px | $1,000/year |
| Horizontal inline post view | 728 x 90px | $2,000/year |
| Top Banner space | 400 x 60px | $7,000/year |
| Newsletter space | 400 x 60px | $1,500/year |
| Inline text blurbs | 1-2 sentences | $3,000/year |
| Guest post | 500-1,000 words | One per year free with other advertising purchases |
For billing, I usually send you an invoice through Paypal. Billing is done prior to any advertising efforts. Although the transaction is through PayPal, you can use either your credit card or PayPal account to submit payment. You can also mail me a check if you prefer.
Sidebar ad space
Sidebar ads (125 x 125px) appear in the left sidebar and randomly rotate positions each time the page refreshes — this helps refocus the reader’s attention on the ads. There is no specific hierarchy to ads in the sidebar.
Your ad can be any image type (JPG, GIF, PNG, or SVG) and color; the dimensions must be 125 x 125 pixels in size. Slow-looping animated GIFs are allowed, but not Flash. You can switch the ad at any time by sending me a new graphic.
The cost for sidebar ads is $1,000 per year. (Shorter advertising durations aren’t allowed.)
Horizontal Inline Ad Space
The Horizontal Inline space (728 x 90px) appears below each post, right above the comments, in the single post view. This highly visible space is inline with the reader’s eye and provides a natural click-point after a reader finishes reading a post.
Horizontal Inline ads can be JPG, GIF, PNG, or SVG. Animated GIF is also allowed. Like the sidebar, the position of the horizontal inline ads rotate randomly with each page refresh. There is no limit to the number of horizontal inline post ads. The cost for inline horizontal ads is $2,000 per year.
Top Banner Ad Space
The top banner ad space (400 x 60px) refers to the top section of the site, in the upper-right corner. The top banner ad is placed in one of the most visually dominant places on the site.
Top banner ads can be JPG, GIF, PNG, or SVG. Animated GIFs aren’t allowed. There is only one ad in the Top Banner ad space per advertiser, but it can rotate depending on the number of ads you want to put in this space. For example, if you have three top banner ads, the ads can rotate in this space with each page refresh. The cost for top banner ads is $7,000 per year.
Newsletter Space
I send out 4 newsletters a month (one per week) to all my email subscribers (4,750+ readers). These newsletters contain links and excerpts to the latest posts (there are usually two posts per newsletter). Usually, each blog post in the newsletter gets around 300 clicks, and the advertising graphic receives approximately 60 clicks. The size of the newsletter graphic is 600 x 70px graphic. Here’s an example:
The image format can be any standard image format (JPG, PNG, GIF), but not animated. The cost for advertising in the newsletter space is $1,500 per year. Shorter advertising durations aren’t allowed.
Inline text blurbs
Inline text blurbs are short snippets of text, about 1-3 sentences in length (or 140 characters), that appear in random positions on every page of my API documentation site. You can define 10 ad blurbs with the variety of content and links you want. Here’s an example:
The text blurb’s text changes randomly with each page refresh. However, the position of the blurb on the page remains in the same (initially random) location.
The in-text ads are denoted with a Bootstrap alert-type formatting, with text that says “Sponsored message” prefacing the ad. Pages not included are contact, search, error, or other non-content pages. A maximum of 3 inline blurbs can appear on each page. Cost for inline text blurbs to appear on the API doc site is $3,000 per year.
Guest posts
If you advertise your product or service on my site, I allow you to contribute one guest post per year. You write the guest post yourself, though I might edit it for style. Guest posts are typically 800-1,000 words long and ideally focus on features in a new release. (Having something newsworthy to write about helps establish the article as relevant.)
These guest posts aren’t merely marketing material converted into a blog post. Try to put a personal spin on your post to connect with the audience. Product review posts have powerful results with search results. If you search google for Xeditor, HyperSTE, Paligo, or Madcap Central, you’ll see some of these review posts appear on the first page of search results. This is because my site has a high page rank and influence.
You can also infuse the posts with SEO techniques when you write them. Almost no one else in the tech comm industry has as much online influence as idratherbewriting.com.
Site analytics for 2019
Here’s a breakdown of site traffic analytics on idratherbewriting.com from Jan 1, 2018 through Dec 31, 2018 (based on Google Analytics):
Here’s another slice of analytics focusing more on audience:
The following table includes more details from other Google Analytics reports (the date range is Jan 1, 2018, to Dec 31, 2018):
| Jan 1, 2018 — Dec 31, 2018 | Number |
|---|---|
| Page views | 1,552,615 |
| Average page views per day | 4,253 |
| Average page views per hour | 177 |
| Unique page views | 1,331,869 |
| Average time on page | 2:40 |
| Users | 687,818 |
| Sessions | 942,306 |
| Sessions per user | 1.37 |
| Average session duration | 1:44 |
| Pages per session | 1.65 |
| Bounce rate | 78% |
| Organic search traffic | 495,033 |
| Traffic from social | 5,596 |
| Social site breakdown | Linkedin 49%, Facebook 20%, Twitter 17% |
| Geographical region | US 35%, India 16%, UK 5% |
| Browser | Chrome 73%, Firefox 9% |
| Operating System | Windows 60%, Mac 20%, Android/iOS 13% |
| Device type | Desktop 86%, mobile 12%, tablet 2% |
API doc traffic percentage
The majority of traffic comes to my API documentation site:
The traffic from the API documentation visitors is outperforming other traffic sources.
Growth from the previous year
I’d Rather Be Writing received significantly more traffic in 2018 (nearly double the page views) than the previous year. The blue line represents 2018, while the brown line represents 2017.
The increased traffic from the API documentation site probably accounts for the massive growth.
Top 10 pages overall (across all sites)
Here are the top 10 overall pages that received the most traffic last year. (The pages weren’t necessarily written during 2018.)
- Swagger UI tutorial (12%)
- Documenting APIs: A guide for technical writers (5%)
- Step 3: Parameters (API reference tutorial) (4%)
- I’d Rather Be Writing: Latest posts (4%)
- Submit requests through Postman (3%)
- Quick Reference Guide Templates (2%)
- 10 realizations as I was creating my Swagger spec and Swagger UI (1%)
- OpenAPI 3.0 tutorial overview (1%)
- JavaScript: Events and Listeners (1%)
- Inspect the JSON from the response payload (1%)
Again, these top pages show that most of the traffic is coming through my API documentation site, with Swagger UI tutorial leading the way.
Age and gender
The breakdown of audience age and gender is as follows:
For more details about site analytics, see Site analytics from Jan 1 to Dec 31, 2018 – 59% of overall traffic going to API doc site.
Quality of impressions
The quality of impressions depends on the influence of the site. Impressions from a highly influential site carry more weight than impressions from a less influential site. MindTouch previously tracked top influencers in tech comm (lately they’ve shifted to “customer success”instead of teach comm). Links to previous rankings are below.
- Top 25 Content Experience Influencer 2017
- Top 25 Content Strategist Influencer 2016
- Most Valuable Professional #2014, Indigo Byte Systems.
- #3 Influencer in #techcomm in 2014
- #1 Influencer in #techcomm 2013
- #1 Influencer in #techcomm 2012
- Most innovative tech comm blogger of 2011
- #2 Influencer in #techcomm 2010
If you have questions, contact me.
