| A fairly common question I receive relates to adding ads
to your site in order to generate revenue. How many visitors do you need, where do you get
the ads and how much does it pay?
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 cheap 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
online 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.
If you are interested in getting ads for your site, you can take a look at: Double
Click
Flycast
Advertising.com
Burstmedia
bCentral
"IMS Web Tips" is a weekly news letter for all web site managers regardless
of experience who are looking for detailed information on creating, maintaining and
promoting their web sites. http://www.imswebtips.com |
Selling Ads on your Site 
