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Comment by AlexMuir | Hacker News Reader

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AlexMuir

The Independent has a daily circulation of 60,000

My site How a Car Works has a fairly engaged daily readership of just over 10,000.

The site earns around $50 per day.

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Conclusion: The Independent's ad sales team is a lot better at selling ads than you are?

Print ads sell for a lot more than web ads.

With print rapidly dying, a re-negotiation might happen.

That's definitely true. I'm completely hopeless at sales.

But I've contracted Google (via Adsense) to sell my ads. For which I pay them a ~30% commission. Conclusion: the Independent's ad sales team is a lot better at selling ads than Google's algorithms.

News papers tend not to be that profitable they are owned by people as a status symbol and a tool.

In many places owning a news paper is like owning a sports team or a gallery it's partially philanthropical.

I don't put media and philanthropy in the same sentence. The media is manipulative and self-seeking. As one example, during the last federal election, my local newspaper told me who to vote for. They glossed over the candidate's policies and honed in on popularity.

Lol, and philantropy is not "self seeking and manipulative"? Do you think all those magnates donating to libraries did it out if sheer love, or rather to make people forget their reckless and rapacious acts in other fields? And the best thing is, philantropy works great to manipulate perceptions, even better than press. BillG used to be the guy who "stole the Mac UI", "killed Netscape" and "embraced and extinguished", to the point of being lampooned on The Simpsons for being a brutal mobster. Then his Foundation happened, and now he's a shiny beacon of virtue. Same for "peeping Zuck".

No. The Independent's adverts are terrible. I really like some of their writers but the adverts are so terrible that I rarely go there. Have you seen the 20 gmail tricks?

I used to work for a news paper website. We sold display and site-takover ads for many times the CPM that you'd get for Google ads.

To find roughly what advertisers pay just google "sitename rate card" and you'll get the list price. Actual price might be less (if they are having problems selling it all) but in many cases it will be close (or at least ballpark) to what ads are actually selling for.

Example:

http://www.independent.co.uk/advertising-guide/rate-cards-an...

Shows they are/were selling at between £20-40 per CPM for various banners.

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