“Declassified” ads with Alpinesavvy

Hello friends!

John Godino here, chief Alpinesavvy web gnome. 

Starting in January 2025, I'm introducing:

  • inexpensive and unobtrusive advertising

  • to an organically grown email list of 5,500+ active climbers

  • via a text based weekly newsletter

  • for small companies offering climbing related products

Here's how it works. 

Started in 2018 and now approaching 600 articles, my website is the single largest source of alpine related climbing tips available anywhere. 

I’m proud to have built this without any of the annoying sidebar and pop-up advertising that plague pretty much every other blog style website. 

I absolutely plan to keep doing this on my website.

However, I’m starting a pilot project in January 2025, of offering very limited advertising via my weekly email newsletter.

I'm calling these “declassified ads”.

These will be simple, text based (no graphics or logos): one web link, one or two sentences (280 characters maximum) and a mention if the company offers a discount to my Premium Members.

For example:

Alpinist - Enjoy the leading American premium publication covering global alpinism and adventure climbing. (Discount for Alpinesavvy Premium members.)

These ads will be at the bottom of my weekly email newsletter. At the time I write this (Dec 2024), I have about 5600 subscribers. I have an email open rate of between 50 and 60%, which is considered excellent. (The average email open rate across all industries is about 34%)

For now, I think I'm only going to run a maximum of three separate ads per email, so my newsletter doesn't look too spammy.

I have stats for the click through rates for every link in my email newsletter, so that tells the effectiveness of the advertising.

Ballpark numbers:

  • 5,600 subscribers at 60% open rate

  • about 3,360 impressions per week, times four weeks

  • about 13,440 impressions per month

Rates:

$30 for one week, or $90 for four ads per month. 

If you’d like to advertise in my newsletter, click this link.

This will take you to a Google Form where you can enter the info I need to get started. 

Thanks for your interest in this. I hope it's something that’s helpful for both of us!

Regarding payment, that can happen via Venmo or Paypal. We can talk about payment after your ad starts running.

As much as we love other sports like mountain biking, whitewater, backpacking, etc, I really want to keep focus on climbing related products and services.

If you want a bundle of four ads, that starts on the first of the month so I can more easily track it,

In case it's not obvious by now, I’m completely new to hosting any kinds of ads! I'm figuring this out as I go along. If you have any constructive suggestions, I’m happy to hear them.

Please send any questions my way, thanks!

Here's a screen grab of some basic stats from my email newsletter from mid December 2024.