And as time goes on, if that seems to be a problem with this site,
and they start losing money because of the designer, they will either
have to change or go out of business. I seriously doubt either will
happen.
"This site" being
http://www.mortgagenews2.com, for the benefit of
anyone jumping into the thread at this point.
Anyway, let's see how popular it is using some common freely-available
metrics:
Google Pagerank: 0
Compete Rank: no data
Alexa Rank: 1,697,203
Netcraft ranking: 5,098,230
Those figures are crap. A personal website might be that low; any
commercial site getting that little traffic is virtually dead.
However, that may not matter much if the income stream is good.
To see what they're charging for advertising, I registered with the
site. That was a bit of a problem in itself: despite the fact that I
have a UK keyboard their interface is mapping the keypresses directly
to a US key map and hence when I typed certain characters on my
keyboard something different showed up on the screen. Having got past
that little hurdle, I managed to register and log in. In order to
check prices, I had to actually create an advertising campaign -
there's no price list. For the 768x60 banner ad slot, the price I was
then quoted was $795.00 for 1000 impressions. The cheapest price I
could find was $595.00 for 1000 impressions of a "News Visualization"
banner (294x50 pixels). If they can sell them all (about ten slots per
page), then that's a potential income of around $7000 per 1000 page
views. That's a lot of money for a website. Using their current Alexa
rank as a basis for extrapolation, 1000 page views is going to take
them about a month to achieve, so if all that advertising is sold then
that's a very good monthly income. But that "if" is an important one,
and it's a very big one. Those prices are waaaaaay OTT, even for a
financial services website - I can't see that many advertisers paying
them that much. So, while it may look good, it's built on a flawed
business model as well as a flawed design model.
Or, to put it another way, if the site is earning anywhere near that
amount, think how much more it could earn with a more accessible
design! Given that kind of brief, and that kind of content, I'd expect
to achieve something closer to a thousand page views a day, rather
than a thousand a month.
Incidentally, if you click on any of the news stories on the front
page of that site, what happens is that it opens another website
framed within its own Flash framework. That's usually prohibited by
most website Ts&Cs, and has been held to be a breach of copyright in
previous lawsuits. I wonder if the site's operators have considered
that? Maybe that's why they're happy with an inaccessible design and
low visitor numbers - trying to sneak below the radar of the sites
they're ripping off.
Mark
Caching helps of course, but