It's not just about getting commissions for CC signups. A large site like Ben's or Gary's likely pulls in 7 figures a year from ad revenue alone. That's why all the big blogs pump out as much content as possible (CC related or not). More eyeballs = more $$.

I run a handful of small websites, and from what I've been seeing, ad rates are 50% of what they were pre-Covid 19 (slightly less in the travel niche). Still, I think both Gary and Ben are doing just fine and they don't need to rely on CC signups as much as people think.

They’re not. Blogs with high levels of regular readers have low RPM as regular readers ignore the ads.

We direct sell a large proportion of our inventory in normal times to BA, Virgin etc but even then we don’t get beyond around 1.25c per page if I covert to $. Last month, relying purely on Adsense at bombed out rates, it was literally 1/10th of that.

We’re not paying a cut to Boarding Area either, albeit we have 2 part-time marketing staff to pay.

Nope, not even close.
But still, eyeballs are always a good thing.

My guess is OMAAT might be making $100k/year on their banner ads, assuming they get a premium but then have to pay some back to Boarding Area. Gary is likely 20% of the size of OMAAT, max.

Dan, I assume most of your revenue pre-COVID has affiliate (card), followed by affiliate (amazon & other non-travel deals), then a rounding error from banners?

I think most people are severely underestimating the potential with display ads. I have two friends with websites that get 80-100K sessions a month and both are earning anywhere from $30-40K per month in ad revenue alone (I've seen the payouts). Granted, these sites are not in the travel niche (which has lower ad rates at the moment), but...that's serious money.

Both Ben and Gary have to be generating at least 300K sessions a month on their blogs. At least.

No one was saying ads don't generate revenue. The question was which individual viewers generate more revenue per viewer. A viewer who buys one credit card yields more revenue than one who just views 10 pages. (And of course the pandemic will result in fewer viewers as well, since there is less interest in travel and fewer credit card bonuses to sell)

Also, the high clicks come from SEO and clickbait, not FTers.

Page impression ads mostly pay for the travel expenses, the cost of generating the content on the website and the cut BArea takes. The CC shilling is the real deal that brings in the serious dough.

We did almost 1 million sessions last month. Ad revenue was under $2000 with no 'direct sell' contracts signed. In a good month it would be 10x that if we sold the bulk of our space direct.

Those number you discuss are bull unless they are directly selling space. If you look at, say, Mail Online / Daily Mail, which is the biggest news website in the world now, they publish their ad revenue and page views so you can work out RPM. It was, pre corona, far lower than mine. I am guessing we may be on a par now as they have little travel exposure.

One of the scariest and most depressing things I've read, ever.

Gary truly is a martyr.

Gary Leff is truly a reprehensible human being.

His pseudo-intellectualism to hide his homophobia stinks to high heaven. If he’s gonna be a bigot, I almost have respect for you if you just own it.

There is absolutely zero comparison between Hilton’s decision to stop using their hotels to house illegally detained children, in accordance with international treaties, and a homophobic bakery not selling a cake to an indivisible because they don’t like who they have sex with.

Utterly shameful.

Made you click... :)

There is nothing conservative nor libertarian about Austin.

in another thread
gary "conservative" ? libertarian in austin

he is/was libertarian, works/worked for libertarian org

whole foods CEO founded it in austin in 1980 and is libertarian