Surefire Way to Lose $150k in Advertising Revenue? Redesign Your Website.

Of course you will only get the chance of losing that kind of revenue if you actually make anything close to that. As for me, no redesign will help me lose that much money because Profy is far from there in terms of the overall revenue so I will hardly get a chance of losing something I don’t have. But if you run a huge website with significant advertising revenue, a simple redesign could leave you without any advertising revenue for weeks – and we now have an example of exactly that.

This is what has recently happened to Odnoklassniki, the second largest social network in Russia. The social network is experiencing decline in popularity struggling to stay competitive with the Russian clone of Facebook Vkontakte – and still losing users at a speed of light. From what I’ve heard, the team and the investors behind the project are desperately trying to change the situation somehow – but without any visible successes.

Probably the latest redesign of the site was intended to serve as one of the measures to help improve the situation with Odnoklassniki – but it turned into a real failure instead. So on the 7^th of August the team migrated to a new website design and suddenly faced an unexpected problem with ad banners.

Two days after the redesign they had to disable all ads on the site – display ads as well as contextual ones. This was a devastating result of some technical problems that came with the redesign. The representatives of the social network did not specify exactly the reason but mentioned that the banners produced unnecessary load on end users’ computers that was too difficult to cope with after the redesign.

It is even more impressive that it will now take the team as long as three weeks (as ads will only be returned on the 24^th of August) to remedy the problem. Since the social network is widely used by some of the largest Russian brands as a powerful and huge promotional medium, it is no wonder that they will obviously have problems with their advertisers and compensating for the no-ads period like this.

But of course the most amazing fact is that the team behind a huge online project like Odnoklassniki (which has truly become a household name in Russia) seems to somehow failed to test how the redesigned site would work in real conditions – under load and with ads included. Or do all their Q&A engineers have ad blockers enabled not to see ads on the site they develop themselves?

Now the website looks totally clean and neat without any single ad banner (and Russian users often speculated about how overloaded Odnoklassniki was with ads) which is very unusual. And while the users enjoy their favorite environment to chat with old friends totally ad-free, the company is losing huge money with some experts estimating that the lost profit will amount $150,000 during this period. Honestly, this sounds like too high a price for failure to make your Q&A staff tests everything properly and avoids ad blockers.

Via (in Russian)