What kind of circulation/web site traffic do you have?
What kind of circulation/web site traffic do you have?
Short answer: Our web site's been live for just over 18 months and we're seeing a base circulation of 20,000 - 30,000 per issue (it varies). Issue 1 has topped 45,000 as of this writing (January 2010). We've also had almost two million total page hits since we went live with this site.
Long answer: Word is traveling fast that we exist and that we're the first totally free model railroading magazine that's available over the internet. Issue 5's circulation, for example, is growing by 40% over issue 4's and is approaching 20,000 in the first month. As of this time a year later, we've had over 45,000 downloads of issue 1.
Our forever free to read business model shows a strong readership growth in back issues - a growth more like that of a book release than a magazine. And all those back issue ads keep getting clicks, sometimes at better rates than when the issue was new, if you can believe it!
We track click through rates, and we're seeing click throughs of around 3-5% as a base rate for a sponsoring advertiser. If you know anything about ad response rates, 1- 2% response is considered good, so numbers approaching 5% is one out of every 20 readers, which is simply amazing.
Each issue, the best new sponsoring ads that issue approach 10% clickthroughs. Our all time record one issue was a whopping 23% (but that's not typical)!
With your web site being only a single click away when you advertise with us, the road to instant gratification for modelers is short.
We also had one modeler report to us that his link in his posts here on the MRH web site have sent more modelers to his site than any other place he's ever posted a link, according to Google Analytics.
As another data point, a European publisher recently debuted a new prototype railroad news magazine (Railway Herald Worldwide) that's totally electronic and free to download. Reports are they're scrambling to get enough server horsepower to keep up with the interest in their totally free railroading publication!
As word gets out that we're free and that we're loaded with in-depth and compelling model railroading content, we expect strong growth for a long time to come. Our business model makes our potential circulation essentially unbounded.
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Please take the following for what it is worth: I'm merely suggesting a new ad opportunity that may or may not be feasible.
At present the forums/blog posts are ad-free and this has meant that they're both aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate.
However, I think MRH'ers might be interested in seeing ads that are related to the content that are in the forums/blog posts and I wonder if it might be possible to do the following:
1. Whenever an MRH poster has launched a new forum topic or new blog series, they (the authors) will be prompted to select a banner ad from a list of 10-15 potential advertisers (all of the regular MRH supporters maybe?) to the top or side of the new posting.
2. Providing posters with the opportunity to pick their ad package would serve as an implicit endorsement of that company's products and possibly inspire favourable comments from others on both the article and the ad which was selected (by a living breathing human instead of a 'google-ized' cyborg bot)
This may be a fruitless suggestion but it is drawn in part from my sense of appreciation for the advertising techniques of Hulu.com which occasionally permit you to select what genre of ads you'd like to see. I regularly watch shows on Hulu and the ads are typically more interesting to me when I get to choose what it is that I'm interested in watching. (check it out sometime on their site to see what I'm talking about - they mix it up so you may have to float through several shows before you encounter the option-based ads).
By 'outsourcing' that choice to the blog authors/forum topic initiators, MRH may just make things even more 'human' on the site and inspire current MRH advertisers and prospective ones to sit up and take notice of the unique things that MRH is doing with its advertising efforts.
I suspect that the ad responses in old issues may reflect
a fresh hobby interest. What I'm saying is that I will frequently overlook an ad until such time as I'm looking for something specific. At that time, I open the advertiser's web page to see if he has what I'm looking for. If an advertiser has something I'm specifically looking for right now as opposed to browsing to see what they offer, the contact may be a "better quality" hit for the advertiser.