We’ve been running, over the last month, a little experiment: we’ve sponsored a handful of small websites in an attempt to test the traditional online advertising model. Some of the sites have only started to operate, some of them are well established.

We used BuySellAds.com to pick – Here are our representative candidates. The prices are in the public domain so nothing to hide there.

The Candidates

• Mobile Inc (www.mobileinc.co.uk) – 300 x 250 left column banner for $10.00/month
• iPhoneDevForums (www.iphonedevforums.com) – 57 x 57 top bar banner for $25.00/month
• John O’Nolan’s Blog (john.onolan.org) – 125 x 125 left column banner in articles for $10.00/month

Whilst we can’t disclose number of impressions (at least not without upsetting someone), here is a comparison. We’ve included the relevance to our core business: mobile and web solutions.

Results

So, is it worth it? In a word: NO! The commercial value of these clicks is 0, none, nada, nil!

And here is a funny fact: we’ve got more visit by participating to the discussions on iPhoneDevForums (people clicked on my signature shown in each post) than from top banner.

And another funny fact: we’ve decided to sponsor one site (not present in this list) based on the founders’ plans, before it went live (the site is now live and pretty successful but the CTR is bad). But they try to monetize too early and they increased their prices three-fold in their second month. It was time to leave.

Conclusions

As we expected, the traditional way of advertising is dead. There is no point in doing this unless you sell a really good low-cost product (rather than a service). We decided to stop wasting our money and finished this experiment.

But, we’re going to continue supporting John O’Nolan. This decision is purely based on the quality of his blog. We’ve been following his business adventure since he started last February and we’ve been pleasantly surprised to find him on BuySellAds and include him in our little experiment.

John’s blog is invaluable for us and we feel warm inside knowing that we’ve supported him in creating so many great resources. BTW, check his Moo cards. Really clever stuff!

The conclusion was partially expected but with a great twist: the sponsorship was decided by the overall benefit a business (or individual for that matter) gets from a site. This does not limit to direct sales or page impressions.

So, stop wasting money and start engaging! Show you care and stop selling so damn hard!