The Wardman Wire

I’m starting running private adverts on the new front page of the Wardman Wire, and across the site. There is a special deal for advertisers during May.

During my blogging break in May, I’ll devote some time to “IT plumbing”, and I’ll take the time to do a full Media Kit then.

In the meantime, this is a special introductory offer for May:

A 125×125 button on all pages of the site - including the front page - from now until the end of May, for £30. The buttons will be positioned above the fold. Mild animation is fine. I will design a button for you for an extra £10 (see most of the ones already on here for examples).

Why advertise now?

Our Audience

Our audience is broad for a political blog, and includes elements of politics, media and technology sectors; so we can give you exposure beyond the narrow political “silo” - as well as within it.

Our Traffic

Our traffic has substantially increased. The site traffic has grown since February, from 7,000 - 9,000 unique visitors weekly to around 10,000 -> 11,000 now, because:

• We have started 4 completely new columns on the blog.
• In the last month we have launched a brand new “topic-based” front end to the blog.
• The UK Edition of the Wardman Wire into a full mirror site, which means that these adverts get displayed to UK-based traffic that previously came there.

Good Value

• Even if you take a figure of 100,000 Page Impressions, and compare it with typical costs for blog button adverts per thousand displays, the price quoted above is inexpensive - around 70% cheaper than the “typical” figures quoted. If you move now, you get an extra week free over a normal monthly rate.
• During the month, I will do a “commercial break” post (usually on a Friday) describing your product or service.

RAW Data for February

According to my log files and ad-impression counter, the RAW February traffic figures are roughly these:

• Unique Visitors: 29,000.
• RAW Page Impressions: 215,000+. You can reduce that significantly to discount search engine crawlers and other “noise”. It comes out at about 100-120,000 page impressions by my estimate. I previous blogged about how much to discount traffic statistics back in February.
• Raw Visits: 74894 - using a 30 minute return figure (the same as used by the Audit Bureau of Circulations - see section 1.6.).

Real Data for February

I usually apply discounts to allow for Web Crawler robots and other “noise”, to come up with the following figures:

• Raw unique visitors: reduce 29,000 by 10% to give 26100.
• Raw page impressions: reduce the raw figure of 217,385 by 40% to 130,000 or so, then by another 10% to 117,000 to be safe.
• Visits: reduce the raw figure of 74894 by 35% to 48,500 or so.

These are based on experience as well as analysis. As you can see, I think that being slightly cynical about web statistics is the best approach.

Wrapping-Up

If you would like to advertise, please get in touch with me at mattwardman AT gmail DOT com.