Advertising On audioreviews.org – Really?
www.audioreviews.org is a collaboration of currently six analysts, all mature professionals in different fields, located in Europe and North America. The site was established in Feb 2019 – entirely non profit and without any advertising or affiliate links.
We have no commercial interests. Our goal is to inform our readership while being learner drivers. We strive to deliver quality. We are not interested in freebies but in accessing interesting gear – and in reporting about it. Your stuff will be returned as long as you cover cost. And we have borrowed a lot, also from private sources, to build the portfolios we are proud of.
We started almost exclusively with iems (currently about 300) but later branched out into essentially everything portable audio, including desktop devices.
But we never intended to earn money through our reviews – it has always been a labour of love – and we will keep it like that.
One thing that always put a bad taste in our mouths is affiliate links: having an incentive to write favourable reviews is an absolute no for each one of us. I’d rather chew my hand off before succumbing to such blatant conflict of interest. Sorry, can’t do it.
Nevertheless, some companies insisted on such – simply to track their sales. In these rare cases, we donated the complete revenue to a Chicago charity supporting stage musicians through covid 19.
I am personally of the opinion we should drop these links altogether. After all, we are no salespeople, be it with commission or without. We see ourselves as consumer advocates, audio aficionados, and…geeks.
And since we are not guided by generating income, we can focus on less popular (but important) products such as power supplies or USB decrappifiers.
However, the blog has a basic operating cost (web hosting, domain name…). And we may need a better web template to improve our appearance. So far, I have been stuck with these expenses. These do not include DHL/UPS/Fedex processing fees, imports taxes, or shipping gear between us for a second review…which affect all of us.
We learn, blogging costs money.
How to offset these costs? Paypal has generated $0 in the last year. Nada. Zilch. I tried Google advertising on their auto setting…absolutely horrible. Google took this site completely hostage – at a meagre return of <$40 (needs to be topped up to $100 to be paid out). Scrap it.
What are the alternatives ? I was thinking of approaching companies we “like” to sponsor us with ads. Companies that, in our collective opinion, produce or sell quality gear. We would put advertising only in the right sidebar or footer but NOT into the main body of text (to sustain the flow of reading), NOT near the top banner, and NOT as aggravating popups of any kind.
Nothing annoying. Nothing into your face. It has to be subtle – and classy. And you, the reader, should be given the opportunity to avoid it altogether.
Any excess money, after hosting and taxes, would go at 100% back into the blog, be it for postage, import fees, or review gear acquisition. None of us will stuff their pockets.
In the end, despite advertising, www.audioreviews.org will remain entirely non profit. And cool as f***!
Let’s see whether I can convince everybody involved.
Until next time…keep on listening!
