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Comment by binarybits | Hacker News Reader

Author here. What do you mean by "short?" The piece is 1,500 words, which is about double the length of a typical newspaper column.

I'm not going to get into the exact economics, but Ars writers write about a piece a day, and the average piece gets tens of thousands of visitors. Revenue per article (for most mainstream news site, not just Ars) is significantly better than $0.001 per visitor. High-end advertisers are willing to pay a premium to put their ads next to high-quality content and to know the demographics of the people seeing their ads. None of us is getting rich doing this though!

We're also fortunate to have a significant base of paying subscribers, which makes it easier for us to write in-depth pieces that might not generate enough revenue from ads alone.

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Hey, great to meet the author on HN!

First of all, let me say that I liked the article. I am the one who posted it to HN after all.

Maybe "short" was not the perfect word to express what I mean. I mean that the message/idea is kind of short. It's almost like a showerthought "See this chart? It looks like they are in the red all the time. But think of it this way: They build success after success. They could have been profitable ever since Model S. But they keep investing in bigger projects instead.".

Interesting, that the revenue is significantly higher then $0.001 per visitor. Because it looks like the main ad spots are filled with Google Ads. Which I run too. Do advertisers really target specific sites manually via Google Ads? I would have thought they do that algorithmically based on demographic factors.

Mainstream news sites aren't going to give you the kind of super-deep insights you're going to find in academic research or trade press or whatever. 90 percent of any site's audience knows very little about any given topic, so laying out obvious-to-insiders ideas in a clear way is a significant value for the average reader. Ars readers are more technically savvy than most sites but most of them are not experts on corporate finance.

I do not know very much about the specifics of Ars's ad sales strategy. I would guess Google pays more to established sites. Also, if you're seeing a Google ad that might be because they didn't have a higher-paying direct-sale competitor for that particular impression.

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