Advertising

In the spirit of openness - how much does it cost to get a banner ad on Yamu's front page? What are the requirements for being a front page advertiser? A question that has come up consistently, and a source of constant discussion amongst Yamu readers is how unbiased is Yamu really? Given you allow reviewed restaurants to advertise here, why would you ever give a bad review? I've noticed recently, an article might give a mediocre review of a restaurant but on the front page, there is a big smiley face next to the review. I'm assuming that is to get people to click on the review and then show companies that your readers are engaged with content and justifies a higher ad rate? Business is business, but the amount Yamu protests the very notion of being unbiased is getting a tad silly. The Audi 'review' recently shown was an amazingly obvious advertisement but never disclosed as such. If Yamu was more open with their readers, I'm sure there would be more genuine engagement rather than forced. Also - please avoid any more articles about minimum wage in Sri Lanka and how the country needs to pay more to qualified persons, when you have your own member of staff talking in reviews about how broke they are. The last time I saw a job advertised with Yamu, the salary was 30-40k, so you're hardly bucking the trend of low paying jobs in Sri Lanka. Basically, stop being hypocritical podium lecturers and be real with your audience.

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indi YAMU STAFF

Banners are usually 80 to 120k. I think there's a rate card on our advertising page.

We do give bad reviews and we try to write what we honestly think. If it comes between and advertiser and editorial we go with editorial.

Restaurants are less than 10% of our advertising business, for whatever reason. It's mostly banks, hotels, FMCGs, and big corporates now for services.

Those emojis you're referring to correspond to a rating, 1 to 5. The smiley is a 3, perhaps we could make it a meh face.

Regarding salaries, we've never advertised the numbers, as far as I remember. We pay every full timer more than 40k, most above 50. I do wish we could pay more but we just had our first profitable quarter ever. And that's just on paper, our cashflows are still quite bad.

We're not a wildly profitable company extorting restaurants and exploiting as employees. We're still very much a middle aged startup just figuring out a revenue model.

People do seem interested in the business side. You can just look and see who advertises and we recently disclosed a lot of our financials at Hive Live, I guess we can do that again and people can judge for themselves.

• 3 years ago
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