Happy New Year, and thank you for your continued support of GIGAZINE this year.

Happy New Year to all our devoted GIGAZINE readers! It's January 1, 2025! Thank you for your continued support of GIGAZINE this year! Bow. The GIGAZINE editorial team also wants a New Year's gift, so if you could send us something from the 'Amazon Wish List' we would appreciate it!

This year's goal is to further develop the community that supports GIGAZINE . It's almost the same as last year! But it's slightly different.

First of all, in 2024, we created a community called ' Camp Gigazine ' to eradicate nuisance and fraudulent ads, and sent invitations to readers who answered 'I'm willing to cooperate' in the survey. We worked hard to erase nuisance and fraudulent ads from GIGAZINE, so the number of such ads has decreased significantly compared to a while ago. Or rather, it feels like they are almost eradicated. Thank you very much to all the readers who cooperated!

On the other hand, to be frank, advertising revenue has been steadily decreasing, especially in the second half of 2024, where revenue per article was halved in just six months. It's not that the number of ad impressions per article has decreased, but only the unit price of the automatic banner ads displayed via Google Ad Manager has been automatically decreasing. I thought that there might be some mistake in the settings, but that's not the case. Google's advertising unit price has simply been decreasing. To be honest, it's unclear how far it will continue to fall. We can't control the unit price on Google's side, and the era of 'securing site revenue through automatic banner ads' is expected to come to an end in 2025.

That said, advertising isn't going to die right away, but it feels like the time has come for a full-scale shift. That's why we need reader support more than ever. So, structurally, we have a three-tiered structure, as shown below.

・General readers: The largest number of readers who come in through search results and social media, and their main source of revenue comes from advertising.
↓
Free members: Readers who have recognized that it is worth registering as a free member because they read GIGAZINE regularly and repeatedly.
↓
・Paid members : These are wonderful readers who help support the operation of GIGAZINE itself.

With the three-tiered structure described above, GIGAZINE will increase the areas it can control and aim for proper independent operation.

In particular, as a result of strengthening the 'free members' portion considerably in 2024, the number has increased to tens of thousands, but I have not yet sent a single email... I never thought it would increase so rapidly... because, as usual, we often have to consider various things to avoid being subject to spam mail sending filter regulations such as Gmail. Specifically, the following.

Gmail to impose anti-spam requirements such as 'unsubscribe button' and 'email authentication' on users who send more than 5,000 emails a day - GIGAZINE

We meet most of the requirements, so we are able to send sales emails for article advertisements , but we have never sent mass emails to tens of thousands of people before, so we are proceeding with caution.

We are also currently recruiting new community members for Camp Gigazine through this survey , so keep an eye on GIGAZINE's future developments.

Well then, I look forward to working with you again this year!