I don’t know if some of you have noticed but Inq7.net is getting too crowded with ads. I did a quick count I on the from page alone there are at least 38 different ads sprawling all over.
I took a screenshot of the main page and colored with green the sections that were for ads. Running pixel by pixel, them ads cover more than 25% of the real estate. That’s over 527,00 square pixels of the total 1.975 Million square pixels.
Can’t blame them though; that’s their lifeblood. Good thing they have RSS for news and an Express version which is all text with only Adsense running on the side.
Had a chat once with two of their former IT developers and they mentioned that Inq7 isn’t really doing well despite those ads. That’s the reason for some cutbacks in benefits and nearly non-existent salary raise.
Their US sales team must be having a really hard time getting ad placements. Some of the bigger campaigns were doing Php120,000 and higher a month. I suppose those are the wide leaderboard on top and the square flash animated ads.
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An alternative they are pursuing is mobile revenues, though this is limited to Philippine users. They have a launched a new application, My Marketplace.
given that it takes forever for inq7 to load, no wonder that they’re suffering from the consequences of putting too much ad on their pages. Whatever happened to Usability?
@migs — they might make money through mobile media since 3G will be introduced soon.
I noticed this even last year. The site was so much better when they were inquirer.net. Now it is just so difficult to use. They totally messed up the previous site and redesigned for the worse.
It’s time to support Microformats and Web Standards
They need to start blogging.
We used to advertise on INQ7.. impressions were good but I think their CPM advertising model isn’t too advertiser-friendly.
Sayang traffic nila. Their adsense ad unit’s on the right hand side which, as far as I’m concerned, is on the colder side of the AdSense heatmap. The site can sure use an AdSense makeover…
And what’s up with the URL changes? bad for link monkeys! >:(
http://www.inq7.net/ - PR7
http://www.inq7.net/index_network.htm - PR0