Skip to main content

Connecting Dots

One of my long-term volunteer gigs has been for a social enterprise. Since they started operations fifteen years ago, online ads had been the mainstay for sales revenue. Customers found they via keyword search, looked up the website and then usually called the main number. Sometimes, they might email but more often than not they called. That business model produced a decent income for the business while employing around ten people. 

Around 2015 the online advertising completely cratered and the business has been on a downward slide ever since. I used to think that not being able to play the online ad game was a function of lack of expertise - none of us had much to speak of. They few times they tried to hire consultants to help remedy the situation, it was just a waste of resources they did not have. Reading this 2018 interview of someone who clearly knows their way around the web, made me re-think how 2015 turned out for this small business and if that was the beginning of the end for many others just like it. 

For years, the site was supported mostly by advertising and a little bit by [affiliate revenue from] Amazon Associates. That worked well until about three years ago, when the wheels started falling off the Internet advertising wagon.

So it turns out the the all sides were hurting in the on-line ad eco-system. The small business where I volunteered was not able to remain visible despite every effort. They used a programmatic ad service that failed to get them in front of the right audience. The ads were being displayed where no one clicked them - such as this very popular blog referred to in the interview.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more