Freezenet is announcing that an experiment is underway with Google ads. We’ve already learned a fair bit.
In 2024, I published an article talking about how the maxim of “content is kind” is basically a dead concept in the modern era we live in as far as the internet is concerned. Briefly, I argued that creating high quality content is no longer even a determining factor in your success because this died out somewhere in the mid to late 2000s. Overtaking this was celebrity status (earned or not), monopolistic power, and whoever would buy out the system the most to ensure you remain a success story regardless of the quality that is produced. In other words, if you wanted to create a success story for yourself, creating an amazing website packed with high quality content that people want is simply not going to cut it any more.
Yes, this sounds extremely cynical, but these observations weren’t made out of thin air. Freezenet has consistently outperformed major media outlets in terms of overall quality of journalism and even in throwing in additional features not really found on any other news site. This includes multiple YouTube channels, a whole section devoted to video game reviews and video, a whole section devoted to music reviews, and a massive Wiki containing several life times worth of music that removes my opinion entirely and just delivers completely neutral factual information.
If this website existed before 2005, it would very likely be raking in thousands of dollars and would be a major force in the online world when it comes to independent journalism as the site would have expanded to have additional staff long ago. Yet, this is not the reality this site sees. Instead, the site is lucky to generate a couple of pennies in a day and struggles to even get recognized elsewhere despite how amazing this site truly is. Not one person has ever volunteered to help the site out and despite pouring hundreds of hours into having an established presence on social media platforms, Freezenet is only experiencing a tiny trickle of traffic regardless of the insane dedication I put into this site.
When I was establishing a plan for growth, the general plan was to only use advertising as an absolute last resort. Like many others out there, I felt that the content should speak for itself and, ultimately, practically sell itself. Sadly, this is not how the internet works any more. It doesn’t matter how amazing your content is or how rich your features are, no one is ever going to find your work even if you are pushing your content onto several other sites and platforms.
The silver lining in all of this is that resorting to advertising is no longer what I had initially considered: to be a failure. Instead, it is merely a reflection of the reality of how the internet works today. To put it another way, it is increasingly becoming obvious that you either fork over the money or watch your careful SEO (Search Engine Optimization) crafting yield precisely zero results.
So, that is why I am taking the leap into just going ahead with Google advertising. It’s one of the last tools in the chest to actually give this website a shot at success given that pretty much every other tool has been exhausted long ago.
For some people, this is just an obvious step and one that they are mystified as to why so many companies don’t do. Well, allow me to shed some light on the reasons why. Simply put, advertising is not only an intimidating thing, but also a hugely expensive thing to do as well.
For me, while I was crafting the ad campaign, I found myself going into complete sticker shock at what was being expected. In the process, Google recommended I spend about $480 per day (not per month, per day). In the lower tier, it was suggested I spend close to $200 per day and in the upper tier, it was more like $1,200 per day. When you are a fortune 500 company, these kinds of numbers are laughably small, but when you are a single person desperately trying to paddle your way to some semblance of success, the numbers are more of a test of your gag reflex just by seeing this.
Ultimately, there was an option to set a custom amount which I happily punched in $50 per day and limiting this experiment to about 4 weeks. For those who don’t realize how much we are talking about still, that works out to about $1,400 in total (an amount some consider the lower end of what a small to mid sized business would spend on average). Not exactly chump change by any means for your average person. Yet, despite this, Google was more than happy to flash a warning about how this would very easily limit the success of such a campaign. All I could do was laugh and say, “if you think you can squeeze more money than this out of me for the time being, you are dreaming.” This before hitting the “next” button. I mean, I’m not rich by any means. Heck, it’s amazing I could scrounge together such a budget in the first place.
Indeed, I’m not exactly expecting miracles out of this. I’m hoping that maybe I can see a bump in traffic and more people who would otherwise not hear about my stuff stumbling across my site now. If anything, I’m hoping that maybe revenues would pick up to the point where I could justify finally formalizing the transition from this being a personal site to a small business either by the end of the campaign or at least have this be a stepping stone to actually making this happen.
In the process of making the ad campaign, it quickly became apparent why so many ads have terrible grammar and wording structure. While Google’s AI generated the suggested text for the headlines and descriptions (no, I did not choose this, it was forced on me), what it generated was very hit and miss. After Google analyzed the site, it somehow decided that the site produces software reviews as well – which is something it does not do as I lack the resources and time to pull something like that off. So, I had to delete the numerous references to software reviews and reword several descriptions to make it make sense.
Grammatically, it was also a pretty broken mess at times. Titles frequently capitalized the first letter for words like “the”, “and”, “for”, “to” and other words that aren’t typically capitalized unless it’s the first word. What’s more, lists replaced the “and” with an ampersand at times which is… not how proper grammatically correct lists actually work. The only explanation I could come up with is the use saves two characters in the character limit section, though this was not actually an issue with any of my descriptions. Anyway, it does explain how some of these errors wind up on ads that are actually floating around. If you are not actually well versed in the English language or you generally are horrible at writing in general, then many of these errors would typically get missed.
In all, I think there were maybe 3 auto-generated text fields in total that I saw and decided that it was actually reasonable. Everything else required anything between minor tweaks to a full blown wording restructure in order for it to make sense. While that sounds like a success, there were close to 100 fields that needed filling out, so the failure rate to generate something satisfactory was exceedingly high.
At any rate, this is definitely one experiment I am very interested to see the results of. Will there be a boost in traffic? Will the site fully get lifted off the ground or was this the biggest waste of money I have ever had in trying to get this site to be successful? Only time will tell on this, but I thought it would be interesting to at least bring you, the reader, along for the ride.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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