Quote:Yes, that was what I was saying. On the forum place there's nothing to do for an adblocker, that was why I was wondering about. Besides: Clear layout and usability are really two of PZ's strengths. Other sites not only have more ads - often their ads look better than the rest of the content. An example is Fujirumors... 
The forum is kept ad free on purpose. It is a rather low traffic portion of the site anyway and forums are, in general, very bad revenue drivers to start with.
I see. I really don't have a clue about running a website as business.
03-30-2016, 07:17 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-30-2016, 07:20 AM by Brightcolours.)
i don't see why ad blockers will delay reviews. But on ad blockers, people do not block ads specifically on PZ, it is for sites that do crazy amounts of ads and which open other tabs with ads and so on, which ruin things.
The only thing you can do is to try to get more exposure to PZ, to increase visitors. Being fast with lens reviews will help that, but you only manage that sometimes with Canon. You lost the Nikon public the last 2 (3?) years, and MFT seems to have disappeared too. Not sure how the Sony "community" sees PZ as viable resource. It seems like the review trio has lost (part of its) interest in the PZ hobby, which is a shame.
Also, when I do lens review Google searches, PZ reviews pop up now way below others, also not a good factor. Rubbish like the DXO "tests" get way more visitors because of that (and steal away revenue in the process).
03-30-2016, 09:29 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-30-2016, 10:03 AM by Klaus.)
Quote:i don't see why ad blockers will delay reviews.
Is that really a question ?
The review are not purposely withheld - that would be downright silly. At the end of the day it comes down to spending less time on all this - so 3 years back it took 3-5 days, now it's more like 5-10 days. Why pushing it if you have to operate in an environment with diminishing effect ?
Around 50% ad blocker users are the reality, not something that I came up with. All content sites are currently facing this reality. The whole industry is discussing how to solve this issue. Honestly I am expecting that the major sites will all have paywalls within the next 5 years. That may be unfortunate and the publishers certainly don't want this but it is simply inevitable. The really big sites have full time journalists and they can't live from hot air after all. This crisis doesn't hit PZ as much, of course, because we aren't doing this full time (thank god) but as you can read here I am a bit demoralized by the development. <_<
The logic is crystal clear - 50% less presented ads due to ad blockers translates to less reach. Less reach = less revenue per click. I can see all that in the reports - these are normalized to 1 mio visitors. I mean let's not be naive here - an ad blocker rate of 100% means zero revenues - at least that should be understandable, I hope.
You are, of course,right regarding Nikon etc. but this has an effect on the absolute number of visitors. I can fully accept that responsibility. However, this has little/less to do with the normalized revenues (per million visitors).
Anyway, the site will go on for the next two years at least.
I can't remember to follow one of those ads - so, the purpose of it it's an open question to me.
We now see how the mentality "everything of information is available for free in the net" has it's drawbacks. The mass tests of Roger Cigala are only possible because he runs a lens rental business and knows more about repairs of all lenses than one single manufacturer does. And he really generates clicks on his site.
It's a lucky circumstance that Nikon is currently following their "more expensive, but cheaper made" path. So their lenses currently are of no big interest to me, the real good new ones are far beyond my budget and also needs. A Tamron or Sigma being good on a Canon will not be much worse on a Nikon, so in a way you shoulder all this efforts alone, Klaus.
I can see you being demoralized and if it makes you feel better I can leave the jokes about delayed tests away. The question is, is PZ for you worth the work? If so, then please come up with a different financial model, don't wait until you get no more revenue. I don't know about others, but I'm not interested in you becoming poor 
Having links to ebay ads is useful alongside reviews. Helps give an idea of cost of a particular lens. A lot of review sites have affiliate links to online shops that are not affected by add blockers, could you do something similar?
03-30-2016, 11:25 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-30-2016, 12:24 PM by Klaus.)
Well, first of all the new portal has to be launched. Sebastian is working on this. In this context we'll also move to a .com address (which we should have done 10 years ago really).
From there on we'll have to see whether the new portal can make a difference as far as the better support for mobile users is concerned ( I have some doubts there). Better ad placement (not more ads) and moving towards managed ads may help.
If not the paywall will be inevitable sometime in 2017. In theory - if each reader would contribute a single dollar per year we would be almost rich. ;-) However, 90% of the users would never ever do that. Thus it is the question whether the remaining 10% would be willing to pay -say- 5$ for an annual subscription. The problem with such an approach is, however, that readers would have hard expectations and providing guarantees is always tricky (server breakdown, human health, real world job assignment, whatever). Another option would be something like 50c per review.
There's also a promising startup where readers can pay a certain amount of money - say 5$. This would allow site access to participating websites for e.g. 10000 page views. The accumulated amount of money is then split according to the access rate between the participating websites. The problem here is, of course, that this startup has to generate a critical mass.
I can also imagine that the internet will be moving towards a closed internet with the internet. e.g. Facebook could start hosting websites with a business model behind it. Essentially a variation of the old AOL/compuserve approach if you remember those.
Thus there are a couple of options, trends and visions around all this. Honestly I (as a reader like you) would prefer to live with ads instead of bothering with all this. But obviously a very substantial amount of internet users have already voted against this.
Quote:Having links to ebay ads is useful alongside reviews. Helps give an idea of cost of a particular lens. A lot of review sites have affiliate links to online shops that are not affected by add blockers, could you do something similar?
Well, we have affiliate links to Amazon and B&H (in the relevant countries). I reckon they are not very well presented at the moment (or blocked ...). As mentioned we'll move to a new portal soon. I have planned to put some work into this after the launch. I don't expect wonders though. At some stage we also tested smaller affiliate partners (outside of the US) but this didn't work out at all.
The well known rumors sites use this a lot (way, wayyy, WAYYY over the top) but they are "harvesting" the pre-order folks. This is a different segment of readers I suspect. These readers are just waiting for the first shop to offer a new product. I tried something around this some months ago but to do it right you really have to invest quite a bit of time which would then lack for doing reviews.
Quote:Well, first of all the new portal has to be launched. Sebastian is working on this. In this context we'll also move to a .com address (which we should have done 10 years ago really).
From there on we'll have to see whether the new portal can make a difference as far as the better support for mobile users is concerned ( I have some doubts there). Better ad placement (not more ads) and moving towards managed ads may help.
If not the paywall will be inevitable sometime in 2017. In theory - if each reader would contribute a single dollar per year we would be almost rich. ;-) However, 90% of the users would never ever do that. Thus it is the question whether the remaining 10% would be willing to pay for -say- 5$ annual subscription. The problem with such an approach is, however, that readers would have hard expectations and providing guarantees is always tricky (server breakdown, human health, real world job assignment, whatever). Another option would be something like 50c per review.
There's also a promising startup where readers can pay a certain amount of money - say 5$. This would allow site access to participating websites for e.g. 10000 page views. The accumulated amount of money is then split according to the access rate between the participating website. The problem here is, of course, that this startup has to generate a critical mass.
I can also imagine that the internet will be moving towards a closed internet with the internet. e.g. Facebook could start hosting websites with a business model behind it. Essentially a variation of the old AOL/compuserve approach if you remember those.
Thus there are a couple of options, trends and visions around all this. Honestly I (as a reader like you) would prefer to live with ads instead of bothering with all this. But obviously a very substantial amount of internet users have already voted against this.
In order to test the water, how about you create a poll asking users how much they would be willing to pay per year (by listing a few price ranges)?
It would really suck to see PZ going away... 
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