Does the Pagan Community Reject Advertising?

Witch School International had hoped in 2010 to move from merchandising &
product sales as secondary revenue and replace it with advertising revenues.
Our goal was to spend more resources on educational and Internet based media.
These transitions was made structurally and our focus change by the end of
2009. It made sense, and still does in the logic of marketing community, based
on the fact that Witch School is the 2nd highest trafficked Pagan
Site in the world (according to Alexa.com).

We discovered after months of marketing and research is the Pagan community is
according to marketing jargon, a non-standard and under performing marketing
demographic. In other words, it is a demographic community that is very small
and yet can be seen as a very unproductive in terms of advertising dollars
spent.

An example is one of our primary advertising methods is Google Adsense, and
since we began to use this service stating really in May, 2009, we have earned
$150. to $200. a month for between 450-600 click throughs. It may seem
productive but what we see a incredible gap between WSI Community and the Avg.
American Market Comparative, and we see we should see a click through rate of
at least 2500-3000 clicks, and a earnings of at $1,000 a month. Even further,
our traffic on School & Social, should produce 40,000 monthly clicks, for
approx. $10,000 a month earnings. Our shared traffic should get a considerable
amount more when compared against the American Average for marketing. It is a
remarkable situation.

So this is not a conversation asking people to click on more ads. In fact, that
is very much against the rules and could get us suspended. That would not be
cool and we always strive to be very good net citizens. So plese do not go
willy-nilly clicking ads because you think it will help. It won't because it
will a aberration and not useful long term change needed.

The real question is why do 99.75% of all Pagans ignore all ads all together,
and the other .25% (one-quarter of 1%) of the community will look at a few ads.
This is an underperformance of at least 800% below the Avg. expects of any
site. In fact from a marketing point of view, the Pagan Market is
inconsequential, not worthy or value of any marketing spending or investment.

I find this latest discovery fascinating and once again show the Pagan
Community is different, is likely to be a post-consumer community, and one that
is extremely frugal. It won't even look at ads and offerings across the net, on
sites of their choosing. This makes it a unique community, worth of study.

What is difficult in all of this for the Pagan community is that large scale
marketers will ignore marketing to our community and will not look at our
suppliers for popular products. This means Pagan-based and focused sites will
not be seen as worthwhile, and not find getting investment easy at all. Most
likely, Pagan sites will be left on the table , available to the lowest common
denominators and bidders, sold to the cheapest of advertisers looking for
bargains. People who wish to build great sites will not have the marketing and
advertising revenues, investment and attention needed.

So for me the question is Why do Pagans reject advertising? What is it about our Community that we do
not benefit from advertising and in fact, see it as a non-factor in our
community and on our sites.

There are no wrong answers here, as we really have few answers at all. Feel
free to offer a theory or idea.