Kiplinger drops ad widgets and increases clicks

Personal finance site Kiplinger has dropped the number of ad widgets on its website, which has increased the number of times readers click on ads, reports Ross Benes of Digiday.

Benes writes, “After redesigning its site a year ago, Kiplinger dropped four of the five content-recommendation vendors it worked with and reduced its number of widgets per page from five to two, said Philip Hawken, business development manager at Kiplinger. Reducing ad clutter led to a 70 percent increase in how many people clicked on the widgets, which helped the publisher roughly double the amount of revenue per user on its articles and triple the revenue per user on its slideshows.

“‘We wanted to control the quality of content in terms of the types of links,’ Hawken said. ‘And with some of those [content networks], you can’t dial in the right type of content.’

“As content ad networks have come under fire for funding clickbait and fake news, some publishers have gotten more strict about what they allow on their pages. Outside Magazine doubled its recirculation rate by building its own widgets to replace Outbrain. Like Kiplinger, LittleThings and Dotdash also boosted ad revenue by reducing the number of ads on their pages.”

Read more here.