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The self serve ad market has been grossly ignored. A good startup opportunity.

http://buysellads.com does some of it, but is very limited in the options (30 day buy only).

https://www.isocket.com/ promises to do more, and seems like a very promising option. it's in private beta now. So, I haven't tried it.

One thing that is very important to understand when selling ads on your own is how those ads are actually sold. Depending on your site, the niche, and how much time and effort you put into the ad sales process, results can vary greatly. At the end of the day, the only thing that REALLY matters is if ads are sold or not sold. Software alone, in my opinion, won't get the job done. With roughly 2 and a half years of data from running BSA, less than 20% of ad sales come from a publishers website directly - sure, some sites are higher and some are lower, but 20% is the average (and we're in a tech savvy space).

One of Arn's sites, for example, came into BSA with a handful of ad sales. And, once we worked with him and his team on pricing and marketed the site to our existing advertiser base in the iphone niche, his sales soared. I don't know the exact numbers, and I doubt Arn would appreciate me sharing these here - but it's safe to say that his ad sales at least tripled once he joined BSA. In this case, it wasn't the software, it was our ability to sell ads for his site.

The point I'm trying to make: there are a billion ad networks out there. Do some research on them before using them, try some out, and find the ones that sell for YOUR site the best. And, if you can sell ads on your own, do it - hard code them into the site, have people pay you via PayPal, and use a network to supplement those sales.

Full disclosure: I run BuySellAds.com

Would be interested in exploring opportunities to work with you guys on ipodtouchfans.com (site in same space as arn's). My email is username at gmail.

sent you an email a couple days ago, maybe I got the address wrong? :)

if you didn't get anything, can you ping me at todd@buysellads.com so that I make sure I have the right email address?

we would kick ass for ipodtouchfans.com, very nice fit with our existing inventory and advertiser base.

Actually that is a fair point. AppShopper's ads have sold much better through BuySellAds than us doing it direct.

isocket looks to be exactly what I need. I've just signed up to the private beta and if accepted will feed back my experience.

Thanks for pointing it out (I'd never have found it).

I work at isocket - ping me at my HN username at gmail and I'll bump you to the front of the queue.

Thanks alabut, another isocket HN member ( jasonshen ) has already bumped me.

But it's appreciated.

Sweet, glad you're in. And definitely let either of us know if have any feedback. We've even been running occasional batches of usability tests, if you're open to going through the onboarding process with one of us.

Yeah, isocket can do pretty much all of that (disclaimer: I work there), including that it looks professional (disclaimer: I'm a designer).

Techcrunch was our first customer, check out an example of how you can request to buy a leaderboard:

https://www.isocket.com/socket/ZOT76H6IF9

I said "request to buy" instead of just "buy" because being able to approve an ad before it runs is an important part of direct sales (#3 in your wishlist of features). Building in those kinds of checks while improving the overall process has been my main usability challenge in my 6 months or so here.

OIO-Publisher is available as a WordPress plugin or stand-alone and is quite powerful. It has all of the features you've requested except stats for the advertiser.

http://www.dotsauce.com/2008/04/20/oiopublisher-coupon-code/

Check out Open X: http://www.openx.org/

I haven't checked it in detail against your requirements, but at the very least if it doesn't do what you want, it'll give you the terminology to search for things you can spend more money on that do what you want...

Unfortunately the downloadable product seems to be close to dead. There have been serious security problems that have not been addressed for many months. Take a look at the forum to see what I mean. Their server side product must be their focus.

That's a shame. I'd heard good things about it in the past. I believe Google are investing in their admanager product with the doubleclick acquisition, but I haven't heard anything about it recently: https://www.google.com/intl/en_US/dfp/info/welcome.html

Do you find that self service ads pay significantly more than remnant advertising/ad networks? I know that a negotiated direct sale will pay several multiples of what AdSense will, but do the self service ads come close to that?

With adsense I was making a very poor return as click-through rates were quite low (it's a discussion forum).

However I've got some advertisers really pushing to get in front of the audience for page impressions and exposure rather than click-thru.

Basically the market I have is niche, and represents the largest site on a given subculture (fixed gear cycling). This subculture happens to be very cool at the moment so even beyond those wishing to advertise bike products to the community I've been approached by EMI Music, Adidas, Puma, etc all to put adverts on the site.

I was going to just operate an intra-community rate to help support the cottage industries (sole traders who make custom courier bags for example) at a low rate. But now I've got very large brands wanting to put adverts on the site it's beyond the amount I can control, yet they are perfectly happy paying full market rate to get the brand exposure into this hard to reach niche crowd.

So basically... for me, for my site, self-serving is incredibly lucrative.

It's just that I have a full-time job, am doing an MSc in the evening, run several web-sites and am trying to keep a social life intact and a partner happy. So whilst self-serving is lucrative my trade-off is that time for my is very expensive. So I need as near to full automation as possible to take all this lovely money off the table and to put it into the community coffers.

I'm estimating it's worth at a low-end GBP 500 per month, and at an upper end GBP 4k+ per month if all of the slots are purchased by large brands. So yes, it's way in excess of what AdSense click-throughs will generate, and all because those who want to advertise on my site value exposure and eyeballs more than click-throughs... we're just hard to reach.

why not hire a salesperson and pay via commission?

Because I don't need a salesperson, I need an administrator. And what needs administrating is something that can be done easily by some software... so why demean someone by making them do a highly repetitive and dull task?

I am working on a SaaS ad server, it has much of what you want but doesn't have full self-checkout and self-service just yet. It does reduce the rest of the work though so if you are interested drop me a line (in my profile).