Thank you, Jake. You've been very clear.I suggest for your explanation to be placed in a more visible place. The FAQ, for instance.

...    * Google pays per click-through. So some pageviews when there are Google ads we are making $0, other times, when there is  a click-through, we can get  anywhere between 50 cents and $10 for the pageview. (PS: this doesn't mean you should click on all the ads all the time! Although clicking casually on things you are interested in would definitely help, we do not want to lose our account because of click fraud!)

    * Other (in our opinion, better) advertisers pay on a pay-per-view basis. For those of you in the States, you'll see TribalFusion ads, and in the near future, 24/7 Realmedia ads. These guys pay $1-$10 per 1,000 pageviews, which although isn't great, it's something, and better than we have been experiencing.

          o But, here's one of the real challenges: we have an enormous international user base that's growing daily. We're very grateful for the contributions they have made, and definitely don't want to discourage them from coming. But the truth is that advertisers will not pay for international traffic. So the $1-$10 number above drops to 0 for a lot of our users.

          o Essentially, we make money off of the US users, and split that number amongst pageviews which include international.

          o If you really want to help in this respect, spread the word about ShareCG in forums, etc. where there are a lot of US users. I'm not positive that I know where that is, but I think CGSociety does. The way to popularize it, by the way, is by posting links to your content (which of course helps you), but real content is often a more interesting draw than an admittedly lame homepage.

          o Also, add your pages to directories like digg, stumbleupon, etc. We'll try to set up tools that help in that respect. Whenever something is picked by stumbleupon, for example, we get massive influxes of US traffic.

      * Finally, we every-so-often get advertisers who buy ads directly from our site. They are usually very, very targetted (e.g., Autodesk), but for whatever reason they don't get enough click-throughs. Please, if you're interested in them, CLICK! Whenever they come, they are our higher-paying users.

    * Finally, we're going to be starting soon with video-ads. They're going to be slightly annoying, but usually no more than 10 seconds for short videos, and 30 seconds for long videos. They should really help monetize a space of our site that we haven't been yet.

    * We're also considering restructuring the pages so that we can cram more ads in there (without it looking bad--in fact, it'll look better). Basically, we're doing what we can with very limited resources (you can imagine if we're making .007 cents per page...) If you do what you can to bring US traffic, and to ensure pay-per-click and specific ads are clicked, we'll be in a better place...

Continues in next post

Edited by Deskar on 11/07/07 10:14 AM.