Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

Web sites that have horrible content or a complete lack of content have much higher advertisement click through rates (using adsense or affiliate links) than sites with useful, interesting content. Makes perfect sense, right? If an internet user mistakenly wanders onto a site or a page that sucks, he or she will use almost any exit available (a well positioned ad) to find the information he or she was looking for in the first place. It’s why these ad-only sites are able to flourish; just buy a domain that will get a decent google pagerank and plaster the site with ads for related products. If your site isn’t “sticky,” who cares! In fact, this is exactly what you want!

I found this phenomenon to be true on my own website in a couple of instances. In the early days before we had bike trails in all 50 states, several of our state landing pages were blank and we filled the space with affiliate links to guidebooks that covered that state. Lo and behold those pages had the highest conversion rate even though we didn’t have a bit of content! Nice.

More recently I’ve found that the conversion rate on our fairly new gear review section of the site has an above average click-through rate, probably because we don’t have much original content yet. I’m almost dreading the day when our users want to hang out there; how will we ever make any money if no one wants to leave!?

The stickiness curse is real and it’s unfortunate in its effects. Quality content providers don’t make any money and the scammers win. Unfair…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005 at 12:49 am and is filed under Business, The Internets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.