Advertise Here: The Hip and the Hype

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If you're paying for online ads, you want them to reach as many people as possible. So at first glance it might seem like you'd do better advertising on a website like Care2.com than on a site like opednews.com. According to a recent statement by Care2 founder and president Randy Paynter, "We've grown to over 9 million members making the world a better place! Care2 is now the largest online community of people making a difference in healthy and green living, human rights and animal welfare." Opednew makes no such claim and might seem to be a lesser value for your progressive advertising dollar. But a little research changes the picture.

Here are the statistics for care2.

Here are the statistics for opednews.

And here's an actual traffic comparison for the two sites.

Care2 has nowhere near nine million members, and their site had about half a million hits in July. Of those about a quarter have visited the site more than once, and the 3% that visit the site regularly make up almost half their traffic. That's approximately 15,000 people. But many of them use the site only to click for causes or send e-cards, and aren't likely to see many ads.

While opednews only has between 150,000 to 200,000 readers, a quarter of them are regulars, which amounts to at least 37,500 people, which means that twice as many people are likely to see your ad on opednews as on a site like Care2 that claims nine million members.

I remember when democraticunderground.com used to claim millions of members. They've apparently since joined an advertising network and now they state the number of registered users, which amounts to about 125,000, not millions as they'd previously claimed. And even those registered users may be people who will never see an ad. The sites that claim high numbers of users are often counting everyone who ever registered at their site, even when people registered on their first visit many years ago but have never visited the site again.