bombscience said:
Hey have you ever thought of Google Adsense as a revenue generating system for this site? It works suprisingly well and you can make some serioius money with it. I'm pretty sure you could filter any of the avacor links that advertisers might pay for. Either way I know people that are making over $1000 a day on free content just using adsense.
Yea we had that running on these very forums for a month or so. Also on the regular site. Same problem you run into with everyone, and this actually responds, indirectly, do ding dong above with his off-color comment
... the Google Adwords system is full of snake oil ads. When you filter them out, you're left with ... surprise... Propecia ads.
There just plain are not any advertisers in this industry that we can use as sponsors. The only two potentials are Propecia and Rogaine. Everyone else is advertising something we don't think works for hair loss. So I can't ethically let it be on this site. I need to be consistent with my standards.
When we had it running, 2 out of every 3 ads was Procerin, Hair Genesis, Avacor, or buy Propecia for $200 per month. Same old junk. People trying to sell stuff that does not work, or trying to rip people off. I love humanity. They have a filter option to filter out unwanted ads, and mine ended up being litearlly 50 URL's long. That left me with... you guessed it ... Propecia ads. When you've got 9,000 propecia ads running simultaneously on the site with no variation in them, people just stop clicking.
So we're back to square one. There just aren't enough NON-CROOKS in this industry to sustain an information site on advertising alone. Even Bosley, which is now doing good quality hair transplants still has a stigma from the past, and if we were to advertise them, people would roar in opposition. So we're left with Merck/Propecia. And Rogaine ... but they're not spending any money to advertise these days.
Sometimes I do wish I ran a site like ... a DVD authoring site ... or electronics. Then there would be millions of possible sponsors. Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, etc. We could build the site up a million times faster because the income would be coming in to pay for programmers and designers to do it. Not the case with hair loss, unfortunately.
The only alternative is providing exposure to private practice Transplant doctors, and you've got sites like the Hair Transplant Network and Spencer's duplication of it that are already bleeding all the money out of them for that very thing.
That is why Merck is our only current sponsor. Not whatever ding dong above was going to try and imply.
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