My thoughts on the ad revenue market

[WabbyTwax]

If you are running a website with to earn advertising revenue, don't quit your day job. This market has been highly unstable and unpredictable and there will never be a standard because demographics, economies and products change too fast and too often.

If you want the advertising market to be profitable in the long run you need to be putting yourselves in the root advertisers shoes. The people that are paying their hard earned money to have their product/service recognized. We need to remember that its a two way parternship and when you take advantage of the person paying to have their product advertised, you make it hard for everyone in the long run to make money from advertising. If you had a business and you wanted to have your product noticed and you paid a large amount of money to have thousands of people see your product, you would want the best results you could get for your money I'm sure. If you did not get the results you expected, you will not pay for advertising again or not as much.. follow the money trail down to us bottom-feeding publishers

Advertising has always been a fickle industry and if you want to stay above the declining profit margins you need to be creative and patient. Try to find new ways to bring attention to the ads on your website so that your visitors can't overlook them as easily. Try not to take away from the purpose of the advertisement by cluttering your site full of other different ads.

On my website I actually provide a link for people to download a popup ad killing program if they get too annoyed with my popups. The amount of content on my website keeps people provoking more pageviews and the amount of popup windows can really pile up and I know that it can be very intrusive especially for those that come back to my site day after day. I want these repeat visitors of mine to feel welcome to browse my site without hassle. I firmly believe that the traffic I would lose each month due to popups does not out-weigh the extra income It would earn me.

Another way to compromise with your visitors if you offer a large amount of desireable content is to offer an ad-less site in exchange for a cash donation to a paypal account. This would not only give people an option that they didn't have before, but however they would then gain respect for the purpose of the ads being placed on your website.

Finally, I think you will notice many changes in the advertising market because the more we plaster our sites with ads, the more the public will try to ignore them. I forsee that the most effective advertisements will be streaming video/audio commercials placed somewhere within the content of the webpage. I've already started seeing this occur in some websites and as technology in the world progresses with faster internet speeds as a standard you will all see more of this style of advertising. Just think.the only thing thats been holding the world back from doing this previously has been bandwidth.

 

[Archbob]

The Ad market has gotten a little better the last 4 months or so, it is very unstable as you said, but I think as the economy picks up, so will the ad market, it will never be as it was 3 years ago though.

 

[Matt]

You're certainly correct about needing to kill the middle-man in the advertising market. Networks and brokers kill revenue generation. Having said that, going at it alone and attempting to sell direct is a tough job itself and the major reason publishers will stick with networks.

As it stands with RedRival, we're currently employing CelebrityWonder.com and Popupsponsor.com. While reliable with payments, CelebrityWonder has missed one of our payments by all accounts. Popupsponsor should be quite a good partner, although the tracking rate could be a little better. And, to get $5 CPM you have to use baby-pops -- and $5 CPM is the only way to even reach the bottom limit where we start cutting off networks that aren't performing.

I would give an arm and a leg to know who WorldZone is using. They seem to be operating quite nicely with banners at the bottom of pages.

We've run through quite a number of networks and the line of reputable ones is getting thin. I suspect we'll need more varied streams than simple popup advertising to get to the next level.

 

[Archbob]

I only have one pop-up that pops one per 12 hours on my entry pages. Actually the text link on my site convert fairly well. Banner ads and other graphics convert less well. I think text links integrated into content that fits your page is the way of the future because they are not annoying and people are interested in them if you give a good description.

 

[DrSobol]

Archbob, can u tell me where can I get some profitable text ads for my site?

 

[Archbob]

I think maybe 'free dvd" offers might convert on your site. Fineclicks and leadcrunch have lots of those. However, I do not think your site will be accepted since it is hosted on a free host(geocities). If you really want to make money, I suggest a paid host.

 

[Alycia]

Matt do you mean what advertisers? Commission Junction and Click Exchange are okay and we have our own banner manager. The company we purchased the banenr manager dissappeared as far as we can see. Well, their site has not updated since 1996. Actually our best advertisers are people who purchase directly through our site. $.50 has been doing pretty good for us. The ad networks aren't as quick to do business anymore with the free webhosts because you can't always control the content of your members site.

 

[Matt]

Alycia: Ah, I see. Perhaps I'll have to kickstart out own direct sales program we had a while back. It's a shame there are so few CPC networks still out there.

I'd love to return to banners, myself. One of the core principles is to provide a good member/visitor experience and popups that spawn certainly do not promote that.