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Why Baylindo

An independent site like ours is the ideal marketing space for any company doing business in the Bay Area (see below for political ads).  Since our pages have been around since 2002, our site has earned the trust and respect of our fans and visitors.  The Bay Area is one of America’s top five markets.  About the size of New Jersey, the Bay Area has a population that’s slightly larger than Washington’s.  Our pages are consistently among the top Bay Area-related search results (see below).  You can create a YouTube channel like millions of others, but only a few can advertise on our site.  You can pay $7 million for one 30-second Super Bowl ad, or you can communicate with your customers here for the next three months to two years at a fraction of the cost.  Be sure to read the About page if you want to know more about our background and philosophy.

Our Mission

Our primary objective is—and always will be—to provide the best experience for visitors to our site.  Our secondary objective is to keep our sponsors happy.

Ad Placement

We can basically place your advertising banner (one banner) anywhere on our site.  But to strike the right balance between our two objectives above, we’ve decided to place banners/embedded videos near the top of the page.  Since our site will never be plastered with lots of ads—we work with only a few sponsors—your banner will stand out clearly.  Minimalism is good for individuals and Web sites.  And since you’ll be working with us directly—and not through an ad broker/server—your banner will not be blocked by third-party software.  After the scandals involving Facebook/Google and fake news/hate videos, it’s nice to know exactly where your ad will appear (no programmatic advertising here!).  Once we set up your ad, it will be displayed automatically on all of our pages (36 and counting).

As you can see, the way we display ads on our site is clear and yet as unobtrusive as possible.  Contrast that with sites that keep serving annoying pop-up ads when you scroll or click on something—and enough with the “Please rotate your device” message.

Ad Content

To keep things simple, we can start with your static company/site logo and direct traffic to you when people click on it.  Note that just having your banner all over our site gives your company mindshare among Northern California residents.  Of course, if you want to improve the click-through rate, you should create a compelling message and design some sort of animated picture (GIF file or Adobe Flash file, for example)—if you haven’t done so already.  Our only requirement is that it should load fast and be legible in our banner window (256 by 144 pixels, the same aspect ratio as HDTV).  You can change your banner anytime you want by simply sending us a different file each time.

Instead of a banner, you can have an embedded video that people can click to play.  It’s completely your choice.  For videos you need to upload to YouTube or your own server first, then we will simply use the embedded code for our site (YouTube and others use iframes to display content on third-party sites).  If you’re not able to insert a promo code or keyword in your video, we can provide a custom message for you on our home page and our marquee pages such as Bay Area Radio Guide and A Practical Cheese Guide.

A word about how YouTube operates:  When someone plays an embedded video on a third-party site, it will not be reflected in the video’s official view count.  So if you have set up a YouTube channel, you should ask Google if there’s a way to keep track of clicks from third-party sites.

The order of banners is first-come first-serve.  So if you sign up first, your banner will appear above others when displayed on a small mobile device.  Contact us for our special offer.

Political Ads

In order to remain nonpartisan, we thought we’d only accept ads for ballot measures and nonpartisan offices.  But some initiatives are just as divisive and polarizing as partisan offices (remember California Proposition 8 and Proposition 187?).  Trying to pick and choose political ads is a fool’s errand.  So bring on the political ads.  Note that they will be displayed in a sidebar column above our Radio Menu.

Our Own Top 10 List

According to Joomla, our content management system, these are the 10 most popular pages on our site since December 2012.

1. A Practical Cheese Guide
2. Gold Rush and Silicon Valley
3. Bay Area Radio Guide
4. Bay Area Radio Mix
5. Bay Area Treats
6. Home Page
7. Bay Area Radio Guide 2
8. Latin Pop Radio
9. About Bay Area Radio
10. About Baylindo

First published in June 2014, our Cheese Guide became our No. 1 page just 16 months later.  It's garnered twice as many hits as our Gold Rush and Silicon Valley page to date.

Search and Ye Shall Find (Sometimes)

Here are the August 2018 results if you use Google from a U.S. location.

Our Page Rankings

Google Query	Ranking
"bay area radio" directory history	4
"bay area radio" directory	2
bay area cheese guide	5

 

What about Bing?  Well, this also-ran engine used to have our pages in the top 10, but after we moved to our own domain in December 2012, Microsoft became hopelessly confused.  Before you clap for Google, we’d like to point out that it was Google that failed to index our pages between 2005 and 2007—ironic considering it was Blogger’s parent company.  So here’s search engines’ dirty little secret:  they are far from perfect.  We are painfully aware of their shortcomings because we’ve been conducting monthly tests since 2003.  Note that Yahoo uses either Microsoft or Google to power its search engine.

Turnabout Is Fair Play

This is how we rate our two main search engines.

Report Card

Engine	Grade
Google	B
Microsoft	D

 

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