About Cheat-o-matic Word Advertising
The idea for selling advertising on the cheat-o-matic came about during a discussion with some friends. The subject of online advertising on busy websites came up and the idea of making the most of my 100,000 page views per day seemed like a good plan.
Reasons to buy
Sites like the million dollar homepage did well out of the publicity surrounding that but they were a flawed concept in that their popularity only lasted as long as the news coverage. There was no compelling reason for users to revisit the site and as far as advertising goes that's a major issue. Another problem was the sheer amount of information presented - something like 3500 unique adverts presented all in one go makes it difficult to stand out, especially when everyone is trying to do so at the same time...
The final issue was the price - $100 was too high an entry point for most people to just 'have a go' and that only got you a tiny bit of space; certainly not enough to present a meaningful advert.
Advertising on the cheat-o-matic solves these problems. Firstly, I have over 120,000 page views per day from about 16,000 unique users and that is continuing to grow. People visit the cheat-o-matic for a purpose, not for some advertising gimmick, and they will continue to do so.
Sponsored words are presented as people submit letters. As a result they only ever see a small subset of the available words and that means your advert is more likely to get noticed among the noise.
Finally, the price is much more affordable - just £1, regardless of the popularity or length of the word you choose.
Should I pick a long word or a short one?
It's a difficult question, but the size of word you pick should depend on the kind of value you place in the visitors. Words such as 'AE', 'AI' and the other two-letter words get huge numbers of views per day, but don't show much context. A longer word is likely to be much more relevant, and while it has fewer appearances in the results list, any attempt to follow the link is likely to be more interested in what you have to offer.
Why offer advertising?
The first reason is the running costs of the cheat-o-matic. At the moment, I'm handling around 120,000 page views per day from real people and about the same again from various automated systems. The Google Adsense robot is responsible for most of these, as it does a fresh query for each unique set of letters.
While I've carefully optimised the cheat-o-matic (back when I first wrote it, it took nearly 3 seconds to run a query, now it's closer to a tenth of a second), server load is still getting to be an issue. As growth continues so does the load and that means the cheat-o-matic will eventually get slower. The adsense revenue pays for the cost of the current dedicated server, but any expansion will need to be covered some other way and it would be nice to remove the Google ads completely.
The second reason is that I'd like to make a lot of money. I think most people would, given the opportunity. At the very least, I'd like to pay off my student debt and save for a decent size deposit on a house. It's happened before with unique online advertising opportunities, and it'll certainly happen again.