Hacker News Reader

Comment by RenierZA | Hacker News Reader

Unique monthly users:

  * Slashdot: 3.7 million
  * SourceForge: 40 million
  * Freecode: 0.5 million

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Hmm. Let's assume 2 page views per visit for simplicity.

44.2M visitors /mo = 88.4M page views /mo

If they're bringing in $20m revenue per year, that means $1.66m per month, or $19 CPM, more or less.

Either they've got a lot of page views per user or they're monetising at pretty high rates. Do /. or Sourceforge have non-ad monetisation methods, or are they just getting very good ad deals?

Or 2 pages per visit is an absurdly low number.

Back when I used to visit Slashdot, it'd be more like a pageview every 5 minutes. The core audience used to be extremely dedicated. I wouldn't be surprised if their pages per visit number is still abnormally high.

Yes, but I think we all use adblock, so I'm not really sure where their views and clicks would come from.

Not since the grand redesign(s). It's been pretty much maddening to use for at least a few years, so my readership has gone down from 10+ PV/day to <1/wk. My uid is 115xxx.

Couple this with their editorial mechanism posting the same 30 word blurb for the same news item everybody else is posting, only two days later after every body has said their piece, what's the upside? The commentary there is no better than other places.

Sourceforge has very aggressive ads, think video, with decent targeting of a high value market.

Slashdot also has the high value market, less aggressive ads, but tons of pageviews per visit.

Altogether the numbers to do not appear absurd.

Importantly, for long-time contributing members of the site, Slashdot gives you a checkbox to turn off ads entirely. (You have to re-check it every so often.)

FWIW, I know first hand that their rate card CPM's would start around $30 and go over $100 for their 'Immersion' unit.

Yowza. That's ... quite expensive.

Slashdot allows users to pay some amount of money to "subscribe" for some minimal benifits. I doubt they make much on that though.

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