Ask HN: Dedicated advertising?
How does a site move from something like adsense into getting dedicated advertising clients like comedy central, specific vendors, networks, or companies?
How much do they pay?
How much do they pay?
At lower volume (say, a 500k/mo+ impressions) you can investigate banner networks like Valueclick, Casale, etc. If you go this route, hopefully you're not turned off by flashing punch-the-monkey ads. It's not high-brow advertising.
Also look into augmenting your income with the contextual link networks -- Infolinks, Kontera. It's decent supplemental income.
For a general-interest entertainment-type site without a high page churn (that is, not a forum or social network), I'd aim for $2.50 overall page CPM. This might require lots of ad units and creativity, but you can make that happen without direct sales.
(Apologies if I've totally misread your niche -- in that case, hopefully all this is useful to someone else.)
The amount you will get can vary widely but CPMs can be very high $5-$10 is a pretty good baseline, but it varies depending on a number of factors such as how much traffic you get, how targeted and engaged the audience is, etc.
As far as payment, it's going to depend whether they're paying by the amount of views their ad receives, the amount of clicks there ad gets, or the amount of sales they receive (you could start affiliate advertising for large companies today depending on the niche). The more info you can provide on your users, and the more targeted they are, the more they are worth.
Do you have any idea how much I should charge? My website is www.thathigh.com and it's growing pretty constantly, sometimes exponentially. It's a fairly niche website, but I've never negotiated with advertisers.
Should I offer $50 and work them down to $20? Or is that too many? (we're talking eCPM here, i guess?) are there any other types of payments out there (monthly for an ad or anything like that?)
thanks, i'm a complete newbie with advertising, i've been thrown into a really good challenge and have alot to learn.
Do you know of any other services like buysellads.com?
Email me at ilya[at]unviral.com if you want more insight into the reality of online advertising, it's funny I saw your comment on HN, I was just recently talking to one of your cofounders :)
This is the exact opposite of what we are experiencing at the moment. We have reasonable traffic (500k UVs / month, 9million PVs), but regularly miss out on campaigns that would fit our site perfectly. Infact, we usually see them on other websites (same industry, different space) and then call up the buying agency who have "already spent all the budget".
Frustrating! We have an advertising agent which is currently taking 35%. Between them and our backfill we still only monetize around 50% of our inventory each month.
For anything more specific, I'd have to see the site and have some questions. If you feel comfortable, post it, or feel free to email me at proexploit@gmail.com and I'll see what I could recommend in terms of advertising improvements.
Yes, we know our agent isn't up to scratch but we are struggling for alternatives. I'll drop you an email.
Most websites only monetize 50% of their ad inventory. The rest is called "remnant" inventory and is usually given to ad networks or adsense. They're going to pay you next to nothing for it, though.
The best way to make more money is to take sales more seriously. You really have to do it the old fashioned way...keep talking to samsung and similar companies until one of them listens. Your agent is supposed to be doing that for you, but it's not the easiest job in the world.
I'd be happy to talk with you more. My hn name @gmail.com