How Ravelry Makes Money From Advertising
27 January 2012
The knitting-related community website, Ravelry, have been discussing how they make money:
We offer pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, and flat rate advertising to companies that are related to yarn and the fiber arts.
I wrote an ad serving system specifically for Ravelry – since we serve our own ads, we don’t pay any fees or commissions to anyone else.
Mary-Heather approves all of the ads that are placed and she makes sure that ads are as attractive as possible and that they are relevant to Ravelry (something to do with yarn). Ads are displayed in small number of locations on the site.
It’s a mostly-free service, but the company is small, independent and profitable. I suspect their attitude towards advertising - respectful of their users - is an important part of building such an apparently loyal, engaged community.