As you can see, Larkware is a source of news and information for the developer community. Currently I'm getting about 10,000 visitors per week to the site. The home page receives about 1,000 views a day, with many more people using the site's RSS feed to get updates delivered directly to them. I ran an impromptu 2-day reader survey last year and had over 400 people feel motivated enough to respond without any particular incentive. You might be interested in some of the information I collected:
Larkware's reach, though, goes far beyond my own direct readers. That's because it is, as many of you know, one of the more influential developer-oriented blogs out there. The "blogosphere" represents some new challenges and opportunities for publicizing products; a positive mention will often be picked up and quoted by many sites beyond the original blog. I'll just cite a personal success story here: when my own book CODER TO DEVELOPER was released, our primary means of publicity was to mail review copies to a few dozen of the top bloggers - and this was enough to put the book on Amazon's bestseller list.
There are two ways that you can take advantage of Larkware. First, you're welcome to send me press releases and products to review. Feel free to add my e-mail to your press mailing list. I'll be happy to accept review products by download or regular physical shipment. My readers are mainly interested in developer products, but by their nature they also tend to need system administration tools, especially tools to help manage smaller developer networks, and testing tools. My own primary expertise lies in the Windows and .NET worlds.
Second, I'm selling sponsorships. Most Web site advertising rate cards follow a pattern: you can buy banner ads of various standard sizes, and you get charged a certain rate per every thousand times the ad is displayed, or per every time someone clicks on the ad. That is not the model I'm following with Larkware, for several reasons:
So, I'm going to try something different. If you'd like to advertise on Larkware, you can sponsor the Daily Grind. This is the column of news and information that I run five times a week on the front page of the site. The standard sections of the Daily Grind are Software, Information, Community, Hardware, and Rants (though they don't all appear every day). For sponsors, I will add one more section, Sponsor, at the very bottom of the Daily Grind. So your section might look something like this:
After consulting with my readership, I am now making available up to four sponsorship slots per day - first come, first serve. You can sign up for the first available slot, or you can reserve a particular day if you'd rather. For ad date availability, see this page. The top sponsorship slot for the day can have 100 words and a product or company logo (graphics will only appear on the HTML version, not in the RSS feed); the other three slots are limited to 75 words. You can have a reasonable amount of HTML markup (which means feel free to link to your own site, put things in bold and so on, but if you use the blink tag I guarantee I'll refuse the ad!).
The Daily Grind appears on both the Larkware home page and in the Larkware RSS feed (each Daily Grind is also archived on its own page on the Larkware Web site for long-term linking and search engine friendliness). I'm setting the rate for this advertising based on two things: sponsor demand, and a desire to keep sponsorships affordable to all. The top sponsorship slot for each day, with graphics, is $100. The other three slots, with text and HTML markup only, are $30 each. These rates are good as of December 1, 2005. As near as I can tell right now, the daily readership is around 12.000 - and remember, ads take a week to scroll off the front page of the site and one to two weeks to scroll out of the RSS feed.
BILLING NOTE I can take checks to Lark Group, Inc., or Mastercard, Visa, or American Express. For credit cards, contact me and we'll set up payment details.
Mike Gunderloy
Lark Group, Inc.
4261 Grove Road
Endicott, WA 99125
509-657-3792
fax 509-657-3709