Part 2 : Advertising, banner ads and cross-links

You have very specific advertising stipulations right down to even banners and links. Can you tell us why it works for you to not have any links to web pages hosted at other servers?
We work very hard to get the consumers to our site, and our clients pay us to be part of our community, where there is already a high amount of traffic. Any links out would be tearing down what we are working so hard to build, and would be betraying our clients that do pay to be part of our community.

Of course, we are constantly bombarded with requests to link to other sites, most wanting to "trade links" and a few wanting to buy banners or links. But it has just never made economic sense for us to do it, and if you open that gate just once, there's just no turning back.

Do note there are several thousand sites that do link to our site or our clients' sites. But, even with that many incoming links, they only account for less than 3% of our over-all traffic.

And how does that benefit your relationship with your advertisers and your control over the World of Fishing website?
We have been able to establish a relationship with most of our advertisers that is much more than the typical advertiser and publisher agreement of "Here is our advertisement, run it for three months."

We've become their "Web company" and this is a much stronger bond that tends to be long term. We are also seeing the needs of our clients starting to include work processing for efficiency and we are able to include some these features within our web systems.

As an example we are processing catalog requests for one of our boat manufacturers. Their web site includes a dealer lookup, instant notification of the customer's interest to that local dealer and at the same time, the factory can print out a personalized letter and label to ship the catalog. Not only are we advertising their products, we have increased their work efficiency. If we only sold "banner advertising" we would never be providing this type of service to our advertisers.

Can you talk about the way banner ads are used on the page and the specific stipulations you have associated with those too?
We do sell banner ads to those companies that have their web pages hosted within our web community. This is one more method of our advertisers benefiting from the traffic generated at our site. We don't try to put a high price on the banner ads, we offer them at US$50 per month, because we think of a banner as a "pointer" to the real advertising -- the customer's web site.

Your site gets over a half million page views a month - and yet you don't "cross-link" to external sites, how has that worked as a benefit for you?
During January, 2000 we experienced 627,000 page views and 227,000 user sessions during which our users spent 47,000 hours visiting FishingWorld.com - all without cross-linking to other sites. As mentioned, we do have several thousand other sites that link into our community, but more than ninety percent of our traffic comes direct or from bookmarks. Overall, less than ten percent is from search engines and links.

What have we gained by not linking out? We've gained the trust to host the websites of many companies whose content is of interest to our visitors as they know we won't divert their potential customers away from their sites. What have we lost? We lost doing business with a few companies who only want to divert our traffic and not be a part of our community.

Continued...