Editor's Note
02.15.01

Selling ads on your site is a topic that is of interest to many of
us who have sites. It would be wonderful if the ads on our sites
pay us enough that we don't have to worry about generating income
and allow us to concentrate on content or our other business needs.
This article gives us some good information on this subject.

I hope that you enjoy it.

Best Wishes,

Selling Ads on your Site

The good news is that you can get ads for your site if you have as
few as 5000 visitors (or less) a month. The bad news is that it
will hardly pay anything.

I suspect that many new Internet entrepreneurs are hoping to make
the majority of their income from advertising. Although it is
possible I feel that for most on-line business it is an unrealistic
expectation. In order to generate a significant amount of income
from advertising you will need to attract 10 to 100 times the
amount of traffic to your site than a company that is selling a
product or service. What do you have to offer that will do that
(besides sex)? If the content you are offering is cheep or easily
acquired (such as sex), then a lot of other sites will also be
offering it.

Our primary business and source of income is developing software.
Although we include ads in this newsletter and on our site, they
represent a small secondary source of revenue. For many businesses
however, even a supplementary income source can be quite valuable.

So what are realistic expectations when it comes to selling ads?

If your site generates a relatively small number of visitors (under
50,000 page views), you can still get ads from several sources.
These are mostly "click" based which means that a visitor must
click on the ad in order to generate a payback to you. The amount
varies but generally seems to be in the 10 cent to 20 cent range.
The actual revenue generated will depend on how good the ad is and
how well it fits with the demographics for your site. From what I
have experienced and heard, you can expect to make between $0.50
and $1.00 CPM. If you do the math it does not add up to much.
100,000 page views a month would generate approximately $75 income.
In order to pay 1 person a decent salary at that rate you would
need to generate approximately 10 million page views a month.
Yeah right!

As your page views increase, you will become more attractive to
some of the larger advertising distributors. The big daddy of
advertising sales (the last time I heard) is Double Click. You
will need to have over 500,000 page views a month to get their
interest. They recently got caught harvesting and selling
information gathered by cookies in their banners. Needless to
say that does not encourage people to click on a banner. I do
not have any specific information on the amount that you can
hope to receive from Double Click (or their main competitors)
but I expect that it is not significantly higher than it is
for the smaller sites. Even if it were double or triple the
CPM it would still only equal $1.50 to $3.00 per 1000 impressions.

What about selling impressions directly to advertisers? The rate
cards I have seen typically list $25 to $50 per 1000 impressions.
That's not bad. At that rate 100,000 impressions a month would
generate between $2500 and $5000. At least it would if rate cards
had anything to do with reality. Finding information on exactly
how much a typical advertiser is paying compared to the rate card
is somewhat difficult to come buy. Neither the advertisers nor
sellers seem to be very willing to talk. I think it would be a
safe bet however, that if many distributors are paying the
equivalent of $1.50 to $3.00 per 1000 impressions, it is very
unlikely that anyone is getting $50 or even $25.

The best information I have found suggests that $5 to $8 per 1000
is more realistic. At that rate 100,000 page views a month would
generate approximately $500 to $800. This of course, does not
include the cost of selling your ads.

Even though banner ads may not generate a lot of revenue for most
sites, they have the advantage that they do not necessarily require
a lot of effort. Once they are set up they can usually be left
alone allowing you to concentrate on more profitable aspects of
your on-line business.

If you would like to get more information about online advertising,
there are several excellent newsgroups and mail lists. One mail
list I often look at is OnLine-Ads which you can subscribe to at:
http://www.o-a.com.

If you are interested in getting ads for your site, you can take
a look at:

Double Click: http://www.doubleclick.net/
Ad Flight: http://publisher.adflight.com/
Flycast: http://www.flycast.com/
Advertising.com: http://www.advertising.com/
Burstmedia: http://www.burstmedia.com/
bCentral: http://www.bcentral.com/

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