Apr 20
Gizmodo’s price per impression for breaking the new iPhone
If you care at all, you’ve seen the story by now: a young dude who works for Apple went out to a bar on his birthday, got his drink on, and lost the next gen iPhone that he was carrying on his person. Somebody inevitably found it, figured out what it was, then sold that to Gizmodo for a cool $10,000. As of this post, the article has over 5.5 million views, 57,000 Facebook shares, 32,538 retweets, and 8,751 Diggs. Staggering numbers all around but they had to shell out some cash for all the publicity. For the purposes of this conversation, let’s clear out all of those social media shares and focus on actual hits to the page. After all, that’s the point of sharing the article, so if users clicked through from one of the aforementioned sources, then that data will be indicated by the page views. All questions of ethical journalism aside (because, what’s the point?), Gizmodo is essentially shelling out about 0.0018 cents per view at this point. Of course, the article’s views continue to mount and could surpass 6 million by the end of the day, causing their price to go down to 0.0016 cents per view. I think most people would agree that spending $10,000 to get 6 million eyes on their site is well worth the cost.
