Scrivs gives and insightful update on his decluttered design approach to adsense – the results speak for themselves:
‘Ever since I made the changes to the design of many of my sites to the extra minimalist style I have seen my eCPM increase anywhere from 50%-100%. My CTR has increased over 100%-200%, but this also has to do with the fact that I added an inline ad on FG for extended entries.’
I’m a big fan of what Scrivs has done with his sites – it seems that he’s managed to increase the effectiveness of his ads but also made the content stand out more at the same time.
Credit where credit is due on his achievements but I look at the main page of the site and I ain’t seeing a blog, I’m seeing a nicely designed portal, now this isn’t a bad thing if you can get a way with it, but my concern is that in messing with what people would expect from a blog, it nearly ceases to become a blog, for example, where is the heirarchy of posts when there is only one post on the main page? It may have higher ad returns but how does it effect overall traffic, how does it affect page views per visitor?
Duncan: A fair point, although there is a very minimal list of recent posts / comments on the main page (albeit “below the fold” on my monitor), and I’d guess he’d say “who cares if it looks like a blog” if the money continues to come in. I wonder what effect it would have on new readers coming across the site and “not seeing a blog”?
To me a blog is just a website that facilitates conversation.
Duncan, that type of design wouldn’t work on something like Forever Geek where there are multiple posts a day, but it works fine I think if there is only one entry per day or a couple per week.
Somehow I doubt if most websurfers care whether something is a “blog” or a static webpage or CMS or anything else. If Scrivs sites are presenting something that interests his visitors (and I believe they do) then whether its a proper blog or in a proper blog format becomes irrelevant.
There are I imagine a hardcore of blog purists out there, but it is a minority.