The Rising Cost of Online Advertising

When we started Nutshell in 1997 it cost pennies to advertise our product and services using PPC (pay per click) advertising; today it can cost lots and lots of $$$,.

Back then, when the web was a bright shiny new thing, many merchants, like us, were experimenting with this newfangled Internet environment. Trying to work out what worked and what did not work; a long and lengthy and very time consuming and laborious experience.

Along the way we learnt which 'keywords' worked best for our audience and which were a waste of time. We also learnt which combination of copy, words and phrases, were best to trigger millions of pairs of eyeballs enough to make that decision to click-thru and find out what it was we had to offer. At our cost.

We watched avidly as search engines developed methodologies for sorting the wheat from the chaff; weeding out those sites that were  primarily 'spam' driven and offered little or no value to the growing audience of web-surfers. And we, along with many others, suffered from nasty folk who played the 'click-fraud' game of repeatedly hitting us, and driving up our PPC costs in order to make it uneconomic to advertise on certain platforms.

As the environment matured and more and more merchants discovered that they too could advertise their products and services in similar fashion, the costs rose and rose. It became expensive to do what we once did for pennies; it is after all an environment were the biggest dog gets to munch on the largest bone. Obviously web engines and promotional companies were quick to realize that not only was there a healthy dollar to be made, but also that some people were prepared to pay obscene amounts of money to have their listings at the top of every search result.

However, longevity does mean something - other than the continual drip, drip, drip of the marketing dollar.

Because Nutshell has now been in existence as a web entity for going on 14 years, it is likely that you will easily find us by a generalized web search, even though we no longer use that scatter gun approach of throwing dollars at online advertising.

We believe that good products plus great customer satisfaction...couple with the fact that we are still the only web merchant operating in the mobile accessory niche who offers a hand made tailor-made service, will continue to see us make new friends and find new customers, no matter where you are.

Thanks to all who have joined us on this ride into the future.
Long may it continue.