Continue reading [Original] I am a Succubus! →

I believe many of you are under the assumption now that everyone is locked at home due to the current “situation”, that the publishers are earning crazy bucks and is having the time of their life right? Well, normally, that would be the case, but what we all didn’t know is that the ad rates is easily influenced by the economic situation.

Since Digital ad budgets are the fastest and easiest to pull when the market drops and revenue forecasts for public companies (the ones that advertise the most) change; digital ad campaigns rarely involve any sort of contract, and it’s pretty simple to cut a campaign or add one back in quickly. Businesses who advertise, particularly public companies, want to keep their company in or near the black as much as possible, especially as they have to report their earnings at the end of Q1 (March 31st). If they can easily cut an expenditure, they will.

The long and short of it is that since everyone is now locked at home, there are much lower demands for stuffs like petrol and non-essentials, so the public companies spend less money to advertise their stuff, which in turn drag down the ad rates. Here’s an easy diagram to compare the fall in ad rates compared to last year:

Another factor which I believe is causing the ad rates to fall is that the ads on mobile devices tend to have a higher rates, but now that everyone is locked at the comfort of their home and is more likely to use their PC than their phone, that has in turn deflated the ad rates we are earning. Not to mention that it is far more easier to install Adblocker on a PC than a phone.

If it is not too much to ask, we’d appreciate it if you can add our site to your Adblocker’s whitelist. And I know some of you out there may be eager to help, but I don’t recommend to spam click the ads. Clicking the ads and immediately closing it would instead increases the bounce rate and be treated as an “ad fraud”, it would actually do us more harm than good. We’ll be eternally grateful if you can just whitelist our site and only click on an ad which you are genuinely interested in.

I know this is a hard time for everyone, but we all should do our part to stay at home and prevent the spread of the epidemic as much as possible. Please stay safe and keep yourself healthy, we can get through this together. Bless you.

I believe the last update had everyone shaking in the boots with the announcement of Re:Library’s end of service should everything go haywire. Believe me, I was too. It hit us so suddenly I thought it was the end of the world. Ever since that announcement, we’ve been looking into ways to prevent the bot traffic from hitting our site. From simple methods of installing right-click disable, using CAPTCHA to block contents, installing Cloudflare, to the more expensive methods of implementing professional bot mitigation services.

What I can say is that, the professional services are hella expensive, it’s not what any small translation site owners could afford, they can range anywhere between 600 bucks to 1,200 bucks monthly! It’s no wonder no translator has opted for professional services and continued to give the content thief the opportunity to steal their translations. If we have to pay such a huge amount per month, we might as well not have ads on our site. It won’t make a difference. In fact, we might even be on the negative side if we do employ their services.

Back to the main point, we’ve been hit by lots of non-human traffic, gets removed from the advertisement platform, looked for ways to remove those “harmful” traffic, and now we’ve finally reached a safe threshold and has been re-accepted by our advertisement platform. Although we are currently safe for now, there are still some “issues” with our traffic so we’re not completely out of the danger zone yet for a foreseeable future.

I’m not going to mention what kind of methods we’ve employed to prevent the bots from learning anything, but if you’ve encountered any problem with the site or has been falsely identified as a bot, please send a report to [email protected]. It will be much appreciated if you can include your IP address, User-Agent, Browser type/version, as well as a screenshot of the page.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.