Online advertising is a long-term cat and mouse game….

You’ve got some valid points… even if you’ve got to much time on your hands (zing!)

best jdawg

Er, ok … Me thinks you are taking this too personal, Jason.

No, I don’t want, nor was I requesting, a TDavid-only RSS custom feed, but that’s a curious offer considering I’m a programmer. You are welcome to send me a link if/when you ever decide to do something like this for all your readers, and sure, I’ll throw a few bones to your cause. Especially if the content remains as good as it is now on those few blogs of yours that I do read. Whether you want to believe it or not, if I didn’t like what you were doing on a few of your blogs I never would have made this post.

And most readers aren’t going to give you this level of technical detail about your site — either privately or publically. They’ll just unsubscribe and go elsewhere. Quietly.

If you think I’m wrong about this, then run a poll on your site and ask the rest of your readers what they think of the current level of ad saturation. Post back the link here and I’ll be happy to post the results and we’ll see if my comments are representative of 01% or .00001% of your readers.

Again, and this is maybe the most important part of my commentary that you seem to be missing, I actually do enjoy some of your content — THANK YOU. Just can’t stand the current ad saturation and that you don’t provide readers with any way to PAY to opt-out outside of doing their own custom programming (Greasemonkey or scraping your content).

Do with this info what you will, including absolutely nothing. I really don’t care that much — if you don’t.

This is my last comment on the matter as we both have better things to do with our time. Just keep my suggestions in mind, please.

>> In fact, nearly half the current browser scroll
>> on Cinematical contains two empty columns — why?
>> That’s just unused, wasted space that the content
>> could wrap into when the side columns have no content.
>> It would also add to the page overall look and feel
>> and be less advertising-heavy, even though it’s just
>> stretching pixels.

We don’t like the blog column being more then ~425 pixels wide. It is easier to read when you wrap at like 400-500 pixels. So, we wouldn’t use that extra space for the blog posts.

You’ll see some more content in there shortly… things like “Top 100 stories of all time” etc. You’ll also see us fill that space up with more advertising… we’re experimenting with CPA stuff on BloggingBaby right now in fact… so expect that area to light up like Time Square… well, not that bad.

Thanks for the feedback… you’re a little over the top and nitpicking… but hey, you were right about the popopen Circuit City ad so i’ll give you some props for that.

we’re a work in progress and getting better every day thanks to playa hating constuctive feedback from folks like you.

best j

As for “pain” being out of the way, again that would be in the eye of the beholder. I just checked and you have one of three page sections devoted to content and the rest is mostly ads and self promotion (clever calling that “navigation” but most of what’s there doesn’t fit that definition).

In fact, nearly half the current browser scroll on Cinematical contains two empty columns — why? That’s just unused, wasted space that the content could wrap into when the side columns have no content. It would also add to the page overall look and feel and be less advertising-heavy, even though it’s just stretching pixels.

I think what you’ve done with the whole stars thing is excellent and commendable and it’s great that you include people. Hey, look who’s #7 on that top 20 list. Certainly don’t want to bite a feeding hand here, so hopefully you are taking this as constructive and not destructive feedback

Also just noticed that you moved the search bar up into the wasted white space formerly next to the Cinematical logo (which is too big too, BTW, if you are going to have all that other ad space in the header space).

Managing subscribers? Hundreds of hours a year per 1,000 paid subscribers are top heavy administration fees and would likely be the result of an inferior designed backend system to handle the subscription flow process.

EXAMPLE. Contact Leo Laporte or one of the other TWIT.tv guys and ask them how much customer support time they have alloted for their donation subscribers to their TWIT.tv radio shows (via PayPal, btw)?

I seriously doubt they have budgeted hundreds of hours for their cause. Yes, you are correct that there does need to be somebody to answer subscriber Q & A, but I’m sure an organization your size already has people in place to handle customer support questions? Probably those people are assigned to advertisers (who unfortunately seemed to slip by an ad that was totally against your guidelines). One simply must segregate the workload for those who pay vs. those who freeload so the paying subscribers get priority response.

Focusing on a 10k market as opposed to the 10M advertising market just doesn’t make sense for us. We’re focusing on the 99% of folks who want amazing content that is free due to advertising support. If you look at how much content there is on THE WHOLE PAGE–not just the first screen–I think you’ll see we are in great shape.

Why don’t you do a survey of the entire page and count up the pixels dedicated to advertisng and to content (don’t just subtrack one from the other since that is not apples to apples due to white space, navigation, logos, etc). Just count up the advertising spots and the content… you’ll see we’re in really great shape. We’re top heavy… but people spend 1-2 seconds up top… then the pain is out of the way

best j