The Price of a Pixel

Highly monetized sites can have an annual cost of well over $200 per pixel. Shocking? Take 1000 pixels x 560 pixels and thats a cool 560,000 pixels above the fold on your site. Now, have your top executives target $150,000,000 from that site this year ... and that's $267.85. That means every pixel has a big job to do. You've got to make this clear to all your constituents: the dev guys, the designers, the IAs, the editors, the sales team. It's a number you've got to know.

I did a site recently where, based on the formula above, the letter "M" cost the company $2000 to print (annually). What does this mean? It means we have to pay close attention to what we design and what we deliver. We have to make the words mean something to our users or we are wasting money. We have a finite, costly amount of pixels so we better not waste them. And what's more? Our execs demand that monetized sites increase their revenues annually -- so the cost of that pixel keeps going up!

What do you think? What's the price on your pixels?