Advertising sucks, an illustrated narrative

benkay The WoL ads were great, BTW.
mircea_popescu They sucked from a RoI perspective.

benkay What dominated the campaign cost? Ad art comission or actually displaying them?
mircea_popescu I'm not even counting the ad making. Actually, I'm gonna make a post out of it, I guess.

We got everything : oglaf, that nice legal matters comic, smbc, ms paint adventures, questionable content, a ton of forums and so on and so forth. As far as reach is concerned, anyone in the comics market was touched, which we judged to be exactly the sort of people who'd be interested in WoL - one of the golden demographics, in fact. Here's the bill :

So to sum up : 4`035`841 impressions at an average 0.00024066 BTC per impression, yielding a total 3`444 clicks (of which 2`924 unique), or 0.085% gross CTR (the 0.57% unique-based CTR is really not that bad, getting one guy to click in two hundred is way, way above what happens in general on teh internets these days).

Here are the banners run :

So now : imagine making these ads cost nothing at all. Just like that. Imagine managing the ad campaign (which includes all strategy, and all hands-on management, twenty or so billable hours - because the data you see above isn't someone trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work, the data you see above is the run once someone's already figured it out) ie all the good stuff ad agencies love to charge the big bucks for off naive customers cost nothing at all. Just like that, you're friends with god and god makes things be free for you only. Really really expensive, rare things that are difficult to get, you get for free.

Imagine the whole cost for this campaign was the ~one Bitcoin you've spent actually buying media. You're well ahead of the game at this point, are you not ?

No, you're not.

Here's referrals and pageviews for the 26th: http://[snipped]

Pretty good amount of traffic, but much lower converting than the previous social media campaign.

Funnel : Visitors 2200 ; Accounts 33 ; Deposit Address claimed 12 ; Deposits 0 ; Games Played 0.

In order for you to make that lone single Bitcoin back, you'd need 100 Bitcoins wagered (which is ∞% more than what was in fact deposited), you'd need an average of 8.33333333 BTC deposited in each claimed address (which is about 850% more than the average Bitcoin transactionⁱ ), you'd need about 3 Bitcoins per account and 4.5 Bitcents per visitor. Which is an unrealistic proposition in the first place, seeing how there's eleven million Bitcoins and seven billion people, it comes to 0.1 Bitcents per capita, or 45x less than what you need. And even if you exclude all the subhumansⁱⁱ, you're still not going to get a match here.

And all this, mind you, to make back the media buying expenditure. Not the strategy nor the management. Just the media buying.

Obviously, "it's a good investment in Bitcoin", the sort that I've been making for ages, without the knowledge, consent or involvement of the "Bitcoin community" derps. Those people will now be curious about Bitcoin and about a number of other things, go researching, discover stuff.ⁱⁱⁱ If you're in my position it's all gravy. But what if you aren't in my position ? And no, pretending like you were doesn't cut it, not in this neck of the woods.

And also - perhaps not as obviously - I'm not about to charge S.WOL for this expense. But all this aside, a major point remains : if your business plan consists of "1. Great idea (IYO) ; 2. IPO to money ; 3. Buy advertising ; 4. ??? ; 5. WIN!!!" you may wish to reconsider. It's not just that it sunk that fucktarded twennysomething posing as a CEO that Andreas M. Antonopoulos was shilling a few months back. It's that it doesn't even work when actual experts do it, and do it well. You won't be able to buy media as cheap as I can, and if I can't as much as cover the cost of the buy what are you going to do ?

Advertising is for suckers. Keep your Bitcoins safe.

1. A shade under 50`000 Bitcoins transacted today (excluding change txn) over ~51`000 transactions coming to an average of 0.98039215. [↩]
2. O, you don't think poor Africans and Central Azns and whatnot are subhuman ? Then why do you want to exclude them from this calculation ? [↩]
3. In this line :

   07:45:11 (SirCmpwn) yo
   08:13:45 (mircea_popescu) hewya
   08:13:56 (mircea_popescu) SirCmpwn welcome
   08:14:47 (SirCmpwn) thanks, mircea_popescu
   08:15:06 (mircea_popescu) so how did you find this corner of the webs ?
   08:15:18 (SirCmpwn) you guys bought adspace on one of my websites :)
   08:15:30 (mircea_popescu) ah hehe. which one ?
   08:15:42 (SirCmpwn) https://mediacru.sh [↩]