Day 2
February 14th, 2008 by Philip KaplanHello!
So in all the hoopla surrounding the launch of Spottt two days ago, I haven’t had a chance to write our first blog post. So… here we go. :)
There’s a lot we plan to post here:
- Tips for making images that get high click-through rates
- Stats & details about the Spottt community
- Featured sites & Spottts
- Drawings of cute dogs
- And so on
So put your email address in the “subscribe” box to the right, to make sure you get the updates.
To start things off, I’ll list some stats. We’ll continue to post interesting stats here in the blog, in addition to releasing tools that help you learn more about the Spottt community as it relates to your own site. But here are some general stats, approximately 52-hours since launch:
- Users: 952
- Sites: 640 (apparently some of you slackers haven’t put the code on your sites yet)
- Total pageviews per day: Around 500,000
- Image with highest clickthrough rate (10%):
Okay, here is the weird thing. The image with the highest clickthrough rate (CTR)? The one with the squirrel? That’s for my personal site. I was apprehensive about posting this finding here, because people might think that I somehow rigged the system to give my image a higher percentage of clicks-to-impressions. But I didn’t.
I was surprised. Today, that image was shown 1,237 times, and clicked 129 times, on the same sites as everyone else’s Spottt. I have Spottts on 4 other sites, which aren’t doing quite as well. So the question is, why do people love that image so much, and what can we learn from it? More research is needed.
I’ll put together a blog post with the top-1o Spottt images with the highest CTR, and possibly lowest CTR. That should give us more info about what makes people click, and what does not.
Stay tuned, and thanks for using Spottt!
Rock on,
Philip Kaplan
Founder, Spottt


February 15th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Spottt is awesome!
February 15th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Great concept, it’s a good feeling to be a member of a program that is brand new. I’m quite sure Spottt will be hugely successful.
Continued Success!
ray heisler of sitebuildersales.com
February 15th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
I decided to use this for PhillyD.tv and I like the idea. I may promote it to my viewers on YT (youtube.com/sxephil). I’m really interested to see where you guys go with this.
February 16th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Yeah, awesomeis the right word !
Thanks for this and all the best !
February 16th, 2008 at 10:11 am
Thanks for this great program….made our life a lot easier
February 16th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
I didn’t realize it was new. Hope you put up a FAQ soon. I have a few questions. Can we put up more than one picture for the same site? Would be interesting to try a few and see which get better results. How do the credits we make get used? I don’t know much about click through rates and etc, never got into seo/ monetizing stuff. I just blog cause I like it.
February 16th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Im having success with spottt so far, Thanks!
February 17th, 2008 at 12:09 am
So far, so good!
I did notice that whenever I go to a page on my website with my Spottt ‘ad,’ it registers as an impression. Perhaps it should be disabled when webmasters visit their own sites?
February 17th, 2008 at 6:49 am
test
February 17th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I’m certainly getting more clicks than I did with Blogrush, but the model seems similar. Is it the single 125×125 that makes the difference? How else are you better than Blogrush (which I flushed)?
Thanks
February 18th, 2008 at 1:17 am
Hey John. I don’t know much about BlogRush. But from what I can tell, they show a text headline from your blog — along with headlines from 4 other blogs — in a single widget, on other peoples’ sites.
Let’s assume BlogRush has an average click-through rate of around 1%. That means you only have a 0.2% chance (one-fifth of 1%) of getting clicked in a BlogRush widget. :-O
Spottt is based on the more traditional banner advertising model, where each ad unit only has a single sponsor.
So mathematically, your Spottt should have at least a 5x higher chance of getting clicked than BlogRush, since you don’t have to share space with anyone. Also, Spottts use exciting images (vs boring text), and are displayed near the top of the page with little or no scrolling down — a requirement for membership. So the difference in click-through is probably a lot higher than 5x.
Did I get all that math right? :)
Thanks for using Spottt!
February 18th, 2008 at 3:38 am
Hi guys, I have problems with my 125×125, can someone please help me? I have pasted the code but there is something wrong.
February 18th, 2008 at 9:30 am
I like this concept, but in all fairness to the big websites, the details of the throttling should be published openly so they know what sort of “exchange rate” they are getting. I understand what you are trying to accomplish, but at the same time you must recognize that the large sites are the ones generating most of the traffic. The small sites need the large sites more than the large sites need the small sites. Seems like you may be shooting yourself in the foot with the throttling concept if it drives away large sites. Just my 2 cents.
February 18th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
A great concept without question!!!!!!
BUT hey? :) The pink color … ?!?! …debatable :)
My impression; this is going to be huge!
How do you work out the exchange rate by the way?