Archive for January, 2011
We recently conducted a survey of Lijit users to learn more about the products, services, and resources we can provide to help our publishers engage their readers and monetize their site.
There was a bunch of interesting information we learned from the 180 surveys we received. Below is a snapshot of our findings.
Who uses Lijit? There was a surprisingly even breakdown between those who write for fun, those who write to make a little extra money on the side, and those who do it for a living:
How do you consume information? We wanted to see what tools our publishers use to learn about their craft. What did we find out? Publishers are hungry for almost any tool – both online and offline – as long as it helps them get better at what they do! Here’s a breakdown in order of priority:
How can Lijit help you become a better publisher? The number one thing our publishers asked for from Lijit was tips for promoting content. Over 70% want to learn more about SEO and social networking. The next most important thing? Staying up-to-date on Lijit news and learning how to better leverage our tools and services… now that’s music to our ears!
What are we doing to help? We’re working on a newsletter, videos, and other tools that provide Lijit news/tips and best practices for promoting your content, monetizing your site, and better engaging and understanding your readers. Stay tuned for more information…
What put a big smile on our faces? An astonishing 70% check their Lijit stats at least once a week! Lijit search stats provide helpful information on a site’s readers – who they are, where they’re coming from, what they’re searching for. For those using our ad services, ad stats provide details on fill rates and CPMs so you can optimize revenue.
What was the biggest shocker? In a world consumed by social media, when it comes to getting company updates over 60% want to receive information through email. Email was the chosen method of communication over our blog, Facebook page and Twitter feed. It looks like email isn’t going the way of the dinosaur after all!
What other takeaways? We’re proud of our publisher partnerships and thankful to those who provided comments on Lijit. Our product team is reviewing your feedback and will be rolling a bunch of it into our 2011 roadmap.
If you didn’t take the survey and have some thoughts you’d like to share, please give us a shout. Thanks for your support!
Tags: industry, Lijit publishers, lijit stats | View Comments
Today we announced crossing 1B pageviews in a 30-day period. That’s an amazing milestone for us for sure. I have a graph on the wall of my office that Tara printed out after we released Lijit Search back in 2007.
As you can see we were quite excited when we passed 100K pageviews in a single day. I used to say that “pageviews are oxygen” for our business. Today we see about 40M pageviews in a single day and the numbers are accelerating. Although we are announcing 1B pageviews today we actually passed that milestone a few weeks back and the 30-day run rate number is now closer to 1.1B or 1.2B.
Our goal from the beginning was to develop a service that would help publishers make their site better by understanding their readers, creating better content through analytics, and finally, leveraging their unique audiences and data to better monetize their site.
Last year we released Lijit Ad Services for publishers. It started out similarly with a nascent number of ad calls but grew super fast because publishers who were already our partners were quick to adopt the service. Today Lijit serves about 613 ads every second onto one of the 15K sites in our network. Combined, about 90M people a month see a Lijit ad on one of our publisher sites.
I’m really looking forward to 2011. One thing that is always constant in the Lijit universe is that there is always more oxygen!
Tags: ads, Lijit publishers | View Comments
At Lijit we are constantly looking for new ways to add value to our publishers. We give you, the publisher, tools like site search so that readers can find what they’re looking for when they come to your site. We give you stats to help you better engage and understand your readers. And we give you advertising services that are easy to implement, with no contracts and payouts that are consistently above industry averages.
So what’s next? There are virtually a million tools and services we could build to help meet your needs so we’re reaching out to you for feedback. Please take a moment to fill out our quick, six-question survey. To thank you for your participation, we’ll enter you into our drawing for an iPod Touch.
As always, thanks for being Lijit – we appreciate your support!
If you’re a blogger, author, contributor or editor of a website you need to read this and think about how it affects your content strategy and reader engagement.
Chances are you spend a lot of time looking for things. Sometimes that means you go to Google (or Bing if you swing that way). You shop, you look for directions, you search for people, you do market research, and you keep up to date with news and weather. Lots of that looking around starts with a simple search engine query. Like most people, you are doing one of three things when you search for something:
- Navigating to somewhere (example: type in a website by name)
- Transacting something (example: type in a brand or product name)
- Information seeking (example: How do I ______?)
As a reader, I search and I want to find the right answer to my question. Google and the major search engines are constantly improving to help me find the needle in the haystack. They use page-rank, my social network, my location, and other signals to help me get to what I want in an ever expanding sea of pages, content, and information.
But… what happens when you turn the paradigm to the publisher’s point of view? If you’re like most writers or authors you do a lot more than just write. You tweet, you post to Facebook, you take and share photos and videos, and you may even have several sites or belong to a network of sites. In fact, the average publisher in the Lijit Network uses six content sources (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) in addition to their main site. Needless to say, publishers create way more content than what might show up on a single site.
As a publisher, author or site owner you want to present to your readers ALL your relevant content when they’re searching for something. You want to present it in a way that is engaging and that of course answers the query. This is important for many reasons to you, the publisher, not the least of which is that it helps you establish a deeper and more trusted relationship with your audience. A reader on your site expresses their intent to find something and now it’s your opportunity to give them what they want so answer their question, engage them! As a general rule of thumb, readers search a site .5% the number of pageviews on the site; more engaging and informational sites get searched as much as 10% of the total pageviews.
Guess what? If you engage your readers more by presenting them relevant information from all your available content then they stay with you longer and come back more often. They view more pages, spend more time on site, and refrain from simply bouncing away. If you can engage a reader by delivering the right search results, they view 3-5% more pages on average than if they didn’t have a positive search experience.
Guess what else? You get incredible information and insights about what your readers care about. For example, 30% of site visitors on average come from a major search engine like Google and each carries with them an important referring search query. Through statistics you gain vast amounts of reader data. What they want to find and what they successfully found. What they searched for and didn’t find. Our CEO Todd Vernon describes these concepts well in a recent post about search results. Pretty important stuff for publishers don’t you think?
At Lijit we built our technology and offerings to help authors and readers connect, engage, and understand each other. It’s the people that listen to their audience and respond to what they want that separates successful publishers from the rest.
Tags: Lijit publishers | View Comments