Doing A Slashdot Coup

Yesterday, Think Computers, one of the TTZ Media Network’s affiliated sites, pulled off what I call a Slashdot Coup. What is a Slashdot Coup? It’s when you get Slashdotted for a review that has matching TTZ Media Network shopping links. For those who don’t know, TTZ Media Network offers a comparison shopping links for all its affiliated sites.

Think Computers was slashdotted for the review of the Planon Portable Color Scanner. Notice in the review there are TTZ Media shopping links showing vendors that sell this scanner – they are listed in the 336 box at the top of the review and under “Related Product” at the bottom. Being Slashdotted sends a lot of traffic, which translate into proportionately more money. However, being Slashdotted to a review with matching TTZ Media Network shopping links translate into a super huge jump in income!

The result of this Slashdot makes a good case study in targeting and its huge importance. The TTZ Media shopping links are targeted to the very item being reviewed. Google AdSense simply can not match our level of targeting. The Google ads shows semi-targeted tech based ads.

Say you’re a Slashdot reader and you see the news post about this scanner review. You’re interested so you check it out by following the link and find the review and the TTZ shopping links showing where to buy it. You also see Google ads but they’re not targeted to this exact scanner (they’re not even showing scanner ads). Which links are you more likely to click on? The answer is pretty obvious. Slashdot readers are pretty targeted as it is. But even those readers only click on stories they’re interested in. So Slashdotters coming to read this review are super targeted and if you provide them with a super targeted ad, there’s a good chance they will click on it. And that is exactly what happened.

How much better did the TTZ Media ads do over the Google AdSense ads? The Slashdot readers clicked on the TTZ Media shopping links over 2,000 times in the past 24 hours. That’s more than 10 times the clicks done on the Google ads. This was not because TTZ Media has better ads. We just have better targeting. Now I can see you’re asking how much are those 2,000 clicks in 24 hours worth? Unfortunately, I can not reveal that information. However, I will say our CPC rates are higher than Google. So take the average CPC you make with Google AdSense, multiply that by 2,000, and then think about this; we made more than that.

Slashdot Coup. Gotta love it!