How the advertisers ever know if the number of subscribers is real?
Today’s post is based on a question I was asked to respond yesterday by one of our newest subscribers, Jaturont Thanapura from Thailand.
==============================================
Q: “I have a question that can’t find the answer anywhere.
How the advertisers ever know if the number of ezine
subscribers is real? Do you have any suggestion an advertiser
(me) can check or test?”
==============================================
It is a very good question but difficult to respond.
First of all I would like to emphasize that the number of subscribers is an important piece of information to look for, but it is not the most relevant data an advertiser has to look for. However, that’s another story and I won’t develop this topic here. Maybe in a future issue …
Let’s come back to the original question “How the advertisers ever know if the number of subscribers is real?”
Because the ezines publishers are obliged to protect their subscribers privacy, no publisher will grant you access to her or his subscribers database.
That’s why, usually you cannot check the exact number of subscribers an ezine has.
The exceptions to this rule are the ezines that are hosted by third party services like Zinester. However, even in such cases you’re not 100% sure that the figures shown are real. As a proof for my saying, these days Zinester faces big tehnical issues (not revealed to the public) that cause some subscribers counts shown by them not to be real.
Then what can an advertiser do?
==============================================
ASSUMPTION. You don’t have to check the subscribers
count for small ezines. There is no point for a publisher
to claim 400 subscribers instead of 350. There is no big
difference. The price would be almost identical, so what
would be the purpose for not playing correctly?
If that publisher decides to show a fake figure she/he will
show you a bigger one, let’s say some thousands.
==============================================
==============================================
DISCLAIMER. By no means do I assume that the publishers
showing thousands, tens of thousands or even hundred of
thousands are showing fake figures.
==============================================
What an advertiser can do is to perform different tests that may give her/him an approximate idea regarding the size of an ezine.
What kind of tests? Let’s see …
Pretend for a moment you’re an ezine publisher and respond to this question: “What can I do to get new subscribers?”
One possible answer is this: get a website for the ezine and drive traffic to this website. If nobody finds your ezine’s website … how will you expect to get a lot of subscribers?
Q: How can you drive traffic?
A: By submitting the website to search engines, to ezines directories, and so on.
Now stop being the ezine publisher. If that ezine you’re checking has a lot of subscribers, then you have to find a lot of online “traces”, right?
So … here is TEST No. 1.
Go to Google and search for the ezine name. To get only relevant answers do not simply search for Ezine Name but for “Ezine Name” (write the name of the ezine in inverted commas).
Let me give you 2 examples.
Let’s search first for “AdsMarket Ezine” [the publisher (me) claims that this ezine has over 900 subscribers (not so many)]. Google shows 399 results.
Now let’s search for “My Increase Newsletter” [the publisher claims over 400,000 subscribers!]. Google shows … 9 (nine) results and one of them is my post New Ad Co-op in Town where I was talking about the fact that I refuse to belive that the number of subscribers is real.
You got the point, didn’t you?
It is simply impossible to publish a successful ezine while at the same time nobody has heard about the ezine, nobody talks about this successful ezine …
TEST No. 2 …
Look for the following information: the date when the ezine has been published for the first time.
If the publisher started to publish the ezine last month and the ezine has already a lot of subscribers … you have a question mark.
TEST No. 3 …
Subscribe to the ezine and read it.
If the content is poor, if the ezine is an ads sheet, if the format of the ezine is far from being a professional one, then ask yourself the following question: why would a lot of people subscribe to such an ezine?
You have a question mark in respect to that ezine …
==============================================
Pay attention when you decide that the content is poor.
By poor content you don’t have to define the content
YOU are not interested in.
==============================================
Then note how many solo ads are published by that ezine publisher. If they are only a few but the number of subscribers is high … then you have another question mark. Maybe the price of a solo ad is too high, maybe there is a limited number of ads the publisher decided to publish or … maybe the number of subscribers is … not so high. You’ll never know … but you have a question mark.
TEST No. 4 …
Buy the cheapest advertising space that ezine publisher offers and track the results of your ad by using an ad tracker.
If the number of subscribers is high but the number of hits your website got doesn’t reflect your expectations, then one or more of the following answers may be true:
- your ad has to be improved
- your website has to be improved
- you’re promoting a program that has been advertised so much that the market is saturated
- the product or service you offer is not attractive
- you’ve hit a very untargeted audience
- the number of subscribers is very different from the number of readers
- the number of subscribers is not real
The result of this last test is quite difficult to be correctly evaluated because as shown above, there are too many factors that may influence the final result.
If you have your own suggestions, ideas or questions, don’t hesitate to comment the topic.
Published in Ezine Advertising Info Newsletter on 11th February 2008.
February 12th, 2008 at 4:20 am
Very good answer and suggestion. It’s worth reading and the most informative answer to my question