Advertise

July 2014 Update: Making some changes in ad types and pricing. Here’s the gist:

  • Changing ad sizes to industry standard sizing.
  • Minimum time commitment is 6 months.
  • Dropping text ads due to lack of popularity.
  • Introducing vertical banner format ads – 140px by 280px  and 140px by 420px.

Help StorageMojo support itself
StorageMojo gets requests for advertising, and as a capitalist roader, I’m pleased. But StorageMojo’s relationship with advertising is a bit ticklish as I value my independence.

So ads are offered under a set of profit sub-optimizing constraints. I’m laying out the constraints so I don’t have to field phone calls and to maintain transparency for StorageMojo readers.

First, profits at StorageMojo are a non-goal as it is a labor of love. The ad revenue that StorageMojo generates is the smallest part of TechnoQWAN’s – StorageMojo’s parent corporation – income. It covers direct costs, but has never covered the cost of my time.

Because StorageMojo is not an advertising driven publication the advertising has special features. Or bugs.

  • Easy. As in easy for both of us. That means payment in advance and minimum six-month terms. One link per ad and you’re welcome to set up a landing page.
  • Pricing. Pricing is NOT per click, CPM or per lead. Pricing is designed so that an advertiser can recover their entire cost from a single sale. In other words: it’s cheap cost-effective.
  • Style. Graphic, animated and video ads are ok (specs below). Animations must be tasteful. My judgment on tasteful is final.
  • Editorial influence. Advertisers get zero editorial consideration: neither in my topics or in my judgment. I write about what I find interesting and relevant and nothing more.
  • Limits. Maximum of 6 square/vertical ads and 1 MPU box ad per page. Ads go on every page, but I only guarantee visibility on the home page.

Regarding advertising on StorageMojo, here are some relevant statistics:

Audience – StorageMojo readers are high-end: average income ~$180k; well-educated; storage knowledgeable; a nice mix of D level managers, architects, engineers, academics, financial analysts, other analysts, consultants and a sprinkling of working storage admins and inquisitive civilians. They tend to be opinion leaders, early adopters and evaluators. A smart bunch.

Visitors – StorageMojo averages 30K+ unique visitors a month

Time Onsite – the average reader spends ~15+ minutes reading articles on the site per visit

Sites Linking In – 530+ links including ZDNet, Microsoft, Yahoo Ask, Wikipedia, StackOverflow, and more.

Ranking – StorageMojo is ranked #10 in the top IT analyst blogs.

Ad Types, Sizes and Positions:

MPU Box Ad – size 400px by 300px, position 1 (top right corner)

Square Ad – size 140px by 140px, positions available 2-6 (right sidebar)

Vertical Banner2 Ad – size 140px by 280px, positions available 2-6 (right sidebar)

Vertical Banner3 Ad – size 140px by 420px, positions available 2-6 (right sidebar)

Ad Specs:

Graphic Ads: JPG, PNG, or GIF format, 72 dpi through 300 dpi ok, file size 40k or less

Rotating Images:  up to 3 rotating images allowed with a single URL for the ad

Animated/Video Ads: we only accept HTML5 banners, as Flash will not display on mobile devices and we don’t want you to miss out on that audience. HTML5 is best as MP4 format, with H264 video and AAC audio playing 25 seconds or less, frame rate of 30fps, if audio is included volume must be muted upon display. This should limit your file size to less than 100K.

Ad Feeds:

Local:  we prefer that ads be fed locally from StorageMojo as our audience is sophisticated and ads fed from networks can be blocked.

Ad Networks: ok, but you are forewarned.

Rates
Here’s the monthly rate card for a 6 month insertion:

MPU Box Ad – (400×300) $900/mo x 6 mo = $5,400

Square Ad – (140×140) $350/mo x 6 mo = $2,100

Vertical Banner2 – (140×280) $700/mo x 6 mo = $4,200 plus 15% discount = $3,570

Vertical Banner3 – (140×420) $1,050/mo x 6 mo = $6,300 plus 25% discount = $4,525

 

Questions? Contact my PA Morgan

Courteous comments welcome, of course.