If you are reading these lines, chances are you will not click on any of my ads.
In one of my previous articles, I have explored several revenue models for open source projects. I have promised to update on ad-supported revenue model as a way to make money from open source. In this article I report back on the relatively poor revenues you get out of this channel.
I have confirmed this fact with many open source bloggers and they all provide the same feedback – Software developers in general and open source developers even more so, are not interested in clicking on advertisement.
Spacebug, for example, is a dev-blog and has some open source projects hosted in it. Spacebug.com has moderate popularity – it gets about 60k unique visits a year. The revenues I see from it is about 100-200$ a year. It covers the expenses but is nothing to write home about.
These are some possible reasons why visitors to dev-blogs do not click ads:
- Developers are not here to shop – they are not interested in anything other than free content provided in the site.
- Developers are so accustomed to ad-supported websites the advertisement are transparent to them.
- Developers use ad-blockers and do not get the ads served in the first place
- Advertises and ad networks fail to deliver interesting content that fits the developer needs
I base these reasons on my behavior as a developer who visit dev-sites and from feedbacks from other open source bloggers
I clicked all your ads for ya. Thanks for providing a service to the CakePHP community. We appreciate it.
@abba thats a great way to get his publisher account suspended!
I have to agree with his findings.