My recent discussion of download stats for our Asterisk book prompted a back channel discussion at O’Reilly about whether the volume of downloads might sustain an advertising model. In particular, we were wondering whether we might do better with some of our short cuts by making them free for download, with advertising support. (Our short cuts are downloadable PDF-only ebooks on focused technical topics, typically 50-60 pages and costing under $10.)
Now obviously, advertising would work only for pieces that were downloaded in high volume and for which we could identify targeted advertisers. So, for example, a narrowcast technical short cut like Getting Started with Silverlight, or Schematron or Prototype and Scriptaculous might not find enough advertisers, but a more buzz-based piece like Making Your Mark in Second Life might. In addition there may be narrowcast pieces with an obvious sponsor, like Sony Alpha DSLR A100: A Better Manual. Or a technology vendor might want to sponsor a series of short cuts on their technology platform, aiming to get out high quality documentation on topics that won’t justify printed books. (Adobe, Microsoft, Sun — are you listening? :-)
While some ebooks might be downloaded in large quantities, it’s also important to remember that a document like this that gets a lot of quality user time and focus might well be a better advertising target than an evanescent web page.
Phil Torrone wrote in to describe the click-through performance for ads in Make‘s downloadable pdfs:
At MAKE we publish a PDF each week with our weekend projects, i obsessively track every download
LAST 30 DAYS – TOP PDF downloads How to make a brain machine 77,242 How to screen print 42,226 Mousey the JunkBot 21,631 Total: 141,099 PDF CLICK THROUGH TO ADVERTISER (microchip) 5/01/2007 – 6/08/2007 Total: 8,022 that means our click though rate is: 5.7% <– awesome.
This stat is impressive, but it makes sense. This is an ad embedded in a document to which people are committing a significant amount of time, and the advertising can be very targeted.
Phil added:
it’s now over 2 years since i started putting PDFs in the MAKE itunes feed, we were the first magazine to do this, we’re also the first that i know of that has a sponsor via a PDF in itunes…. people also download the files directly too, but itunes is really a RSS reader, we feed it movies and PDFs, people never need to look for them, they’re there each week.
In other words, your mileage may vary :-)