Does Sponsoring Daring Fireball Work?

A previous amusing note from Gruber[1] on his sponsorship system and a sales email from Taboola, purveyor of the obnoxious click-bait grids that you&#x27;re starting to see all over:<p>&gt; Speaking of revenue and pageviews, true story: I got an email yesterday from a sales rep at Taboola, pitching me on running their ads on DF. It included this line: “I see your site is not monetized at present, and I think there is room to do so in a non-intrusive manner that can still make you money.”<p>&gt; I don’t know what I love most about that. I think it’s that from the eyes of someone who sees Taboola ads as “non-intrusive”, what I’m doing at Daring Fireball doesn’t look like “monetization” at all. Needless to say, I find Taboola ads to be highly intrusive. (You may not be familiar with the “Taboola” name, but you’ve seen their ads. They look like this[2].)<p>I really like what he does, and it makes the rest of the web remind me of the bloatware loaded Windows installs on every PC that isn&#x27;t sold directly by MS. Short term money at the cost of a slower and more annoying experience that users hate in the long term.<p>[1] <a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/10/09/more-df-rss-feed-sponsorship-openings" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;linked&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;09&#x2F;more-df-rss-feed...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://daringfireball.net/misc/2014/10/not-intrusive-at-all.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;misc&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;not-intrusive-at-all....</a>

Really interesting to see these numbers. I&#x27;ve been reading DF for years and years, and its is the only advertising model I&#x27;ve encountered that doesn&#x27;t grate. His advertising is considerate, audience appropriate, and vetted. I feel good supporting his advertisers, because I feel good supporting him, and because they&#x27;re just consistently things I&#x27;m happy to hear about.<p>I would really love to see more independent journalists follow his model, although obviously his market is more suited to this model than some others are. Still, I think there&#x27;s a lot to learn, here.

Yev with Backblaze here -&gt; I&#x27;m a bit late to this party, but I can tell you that advertising with John has worked for Backblaze from a monetary perspective. It&#x27;s a mutually beneficial sponsorship. John&#x27;s used us in the past, Marco uses us on occasion, and due to that, the ads are read with a certain knowledge of the product and ring more &quot;true&quot; than a lot of things that I hear on various podcasts and websites. The majority of the ads we&#x27;ve done with John are sponsorships of &quot;The Talk Show&quot;, but those have been quite successful.

Congratulations to the author and a succesful campaign.<p>My favourite part of his post reminded me of a quote my marketing professor once told me &quot;The most important thing in a marketing campaign is a great product&quot;<p>Had desk been a poor product, I doubt the Halo-effect would have happened.

If you have a Mac App or iOS app, Daring Fireball would be a great place to advertise. I&#x27;d like to here from some of the web apps that are promoted, do they have a same uptick in subscribers?

&gt; I went on to grab a net-revenue (profit) of just north of $32,000 for the month of December, 2014<p>That&#x27;s pretty darn impressive. Congratulations! Excellent copy writing on your desk.pm landing page as well.

This section confused me -- can anyone explain?<p>&gt; I was so unprepared for this deluge that it stunted what was already going to be a banner month as <i>I simply did not have enough review copies and tokens to go around</i>. I ended up having to wait-list over 30 prominent blogs which hurt my momentum severely.<p>He&#x27;s selling <i>software</i>, right? It sounds here like he hit problems that simply shouldn&#x27;t exist for a digital product.<p>Is this an AppStore-specific problem? If so, why in the world should it work that way?

This was very helpful and thanks for publishing. Right near the end you just touched upon what i think is an important topic (perhaps its own post) If you could chart it your first exposure to John&#x27;s (or anyones) audience is probably 80% of the bang for the buck. Sponsoring again 4 to 6 months later really only exposes you to net new readers since your first exposure or those that missed your first exposure and&#x2F;or weren&#x27;t a good target then but are now. If John is charging the same amount for each sponsorship the pricing model is broken for both of you. It sounds like you&#x27;re underpaying for the 1st one and overpaying for additional and vice a versa for John. In general it&#x27;s just something worth noting for anyone who advertises via such distinct channels (Imagine if HN let you do the same thing how your traffic and sales would be impacted by the 1st time you were on the homepage for 8 hours vs if you did it again 3 months later)

I suspect this is a lot more informative about the future of journalism. The &#x27;old school&#x27; magazine&#x2F;newspaper group was all about getting &#x27;readership&#x27; and then &#x27;blasting their eyeballs&#x27;. And there was a tremendous amount of loss to their madness. 6 months after a magazine was published it was entirely unlikely that someone would pick up that issue, see an advertising message, and act on it.<p>But on the web the long tail is the long tail. Search engines can pull an article out of the mists of time and that advertising is still intact. So you&#x27;re exposure is very different.<p>Combining that with the curating effects of a trusted source, and you get a solid advertising value for the right brands.<p>I expect it will be &quot;successes&quot; like DF which inspire additional people to create this sort of content and that seems to be a good thing for everyone (advertisers and readers).

Great post. Thank you for sharing all of this - really great information and I&#x27;m thrilled for you that you took a risk and it really paid off. Cheers to that!<p>That said, your site has so few images on it of the actual product, that for a price of $30, I feel like you are holding back for a reason. I buy anything and everything, but this doesn&#x27;t feel right. When someone displays their admittedly very nice logo far more than the product I get a flashing warning sign. My 2 cents.<p>When I can either get a demo or see more of the product I will probably buy.<p>Again, congratulations on your successful launch!

What&#x27;s often under appraciated about sponsored content is that it does seem to be catching on as valuable channel to acquire customers not just branding exposure.<p>Here is a case study from Dash as well.<p><a href="https://syndicateads.net/casestudy/dash.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;syndicateads.net&#x2F;casestudy&#x2F;dash.pdf</a><p>(Full disclosure I&#x27;m on the team at SyndicateAds)

I think his model works well for his blog. Not all blogs work well with this model and it doesn&#x27;t necessarily scale well to a large news org.<p>For what he does and how he does it, this is a cool model for both him, his audience, and apparently the advertisers.

I&#x27;ve done a quick RETROSPECTIVE on how this &quot;viral event&quot; impacted sales: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8959967" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8959967</a><p>:)<p>Thanks everyone! That was fun.

TLDR: &quot;Yes, DaringFireball worked for me.&quot;