Making money

Just working through my initial review of the service and am curious about the KA pricing structure and generating your own revenue using KA. Can someone walk me through some example scenarios where paying the 100 or 300/month service fee leaves enough room to generate a profit for a site owner?

If I read everything correctly, it’s 5k page views for 100 bucks or 20k page views for 300/month. But, if you take over your ad campaign and run say on average 2 or 3 ads per page max and your cpm is around $1-$3(which is typical to high for low-traffic sites) how would someone make any $ hosting on KA?

Am I missing something?

Here’s an example:

2 ads per page, $2/cpm for each ad to my advertisers, using the h00/month service option with KA, i then get exactly 5k page views each month, i only gross $4×5 = $20/month… ?

Anyway, just curious if anyone is using KA to create profitable sites or is the focus mainly on offering free sites and not generating any $ for yourself…?

Thanks for any insights!

Chris

(another post on this thread)

Re: Making money

I agree, the Kickapps ad buyout model is entirely too high and unfair. It is near impossible for a small publisher to make $100 off of a mere 5,000 page views. I just do not get how they come up with this pricing, it is ridiculous to charge 100 bucks for 5,000 measly page views and assume that affilates will be able recoup that. Google alone, which is what Kickapps uses to serve ads, does not pay any where near that kind of CPM.

Compare that to Ning which charges $25 a month to control the ads on your Ning site, then Kickapps fee is highway robbery. I could see a flat 100 a month regardless of page views or 100 bucks for like 100,000 page views, but to charge 100 a month AND have such a tiny page view cap on top of that is ridiculous.

Couple that with what I just read on another thread about traffic reporting, found here: http://communit...47&d=145716

Apparently while traffic reporting services like Google Analytics do not count bots and other erroneuous traffic in the page view counts, Kickapps DOES. Which means that you are not just paying for the page views of actual people, you are also paying for the page views of those bots and other ridiculous things.

Kickapps, you really need to explain this better or reevaluate this model. It just does not seem fair at all.

What say you other afiliates? Fair or Not?

(Post from a KA power-user nikkigibbons)

Re: Traffic issues

I’ve noticed the same thing actually but have been focused on other things with my site and haven’t taken the time to investigate and since I hadn’t seen anyone bring it up assumed maybe it was a non issue.

When I do look at it I always notice that kickapps has my pageviews at higher than google does. I have a core site with a ton of pages and then the kickapps pages on top of that, and often the Kickapps report shows more page view for the kickapps pages alone that google shows for both my core site and kickapps pages combined.

I just did a quick comparision and here is what I see for the period of 9/30/08-10/29/08

Kickapps page view reporting (which does not include my core site traffic):

56,054 page views

Google Analytics Reporting (this includes my site and kickapps pages since I have the google tracking in kickapps also)

18,763 page views

HUGE difference there especially considering that the KA report is just for the KA powered portion of my site.

This either means that Kickapps page view reporting is flawed and needs to be fixed or that some how Google tracking is not logging Kickapps pages properly. Though I doubt that is the case because I do see kickapps pages listed in my analytics reporting. As much as I would love for the higher KA report to be true, I do not believe this is the case. Perhaps the KA page view report is actually a report of ad views which would be higher than page views if there is more than one ad being served to a page. Not sure but whatever the issue it needs to be looked into and adressed.

(Response from KA moderator)

Re: Traffic issues

The google tracker doesnt account for web crawlers. So spiders and robots are blocked by the google tracker whereas the stats in the AC count every single page request. That is why the google analytics shows a much lower number of views.

OK – HUH? Why did they get $14m recently? Is it because they figured out how to fleece a bunch of desparate SMBs in the downturn? Geez.

to that extant, ning kinda addresses it half-way, because the identity is portable across websites.

congrats, kickapps, would be interested to see how you’d fix the problem.

That’s like SocialText (enterprise) and MediaWiki (free) – both organizations have the same people on their boards, but the difference is huge.

Companies like Kickapps offer something that you can plug in to your site with out changing the look or feel of the site but add the social networking element if you want. Or if you want to give your users the ability to upload video or photos without using bandwidth from your servers. It has it’s place in the world I suppose. They are a little high on the add rates and should give users the ability to place at least one ad or share that revenue with the users of the site ( Not sure if they do)

Anyway congrats Kickapps!