Web Advertising Revenues?

WoTG asks: "Every now and then I dream about starting a website and making it popular. Maybe for profit, maybe for fun. Web hosting costs are pretty easy to find and estimate. But I've always been stumped when it comes to guesstimating the revenue. How much can a moderately popular site expect to earn from advertising revenue? What companies that resell advertising space are -reliable- in their payments? How much more expensive are the larger ads (bigger than banners) worth? What websites are good for finding out more about this stuff?"

"For the sake of argument, let's say that it's a fairly targeted audience - maybe a forum for fans of a new TV series, or residents of a particular city. Let's also assume that it will have about a million hits a month. Lastly, let's assume we're only considering non-intrusive advertising, e.g. no pop-ups.

I've done little bit of research (but not much). Those spiffy google text ads are only available to sites with >20M hits a month. I've yet to stumble on good search terms on Google that will get me relevant results. Besides, more often than not, the insights from the Slashdot crowd are more useful than any other web 'resource'."

Comments

Wrong question

[bpb213]

You are asking on slashdot. That implies you have read slashdot. Which in turn implies that you understand the opinions here. One thing most slashdotters hate is advertisements. I know I do. I run mozilla with the advertisement blocking stylesheet.

The right question to ask is not, "how do i make instant money off advertisers?", but "How do i make a good site advertisement free that supports itself?"

Now, go rephrase your question and ask slashdot again.

Sell Your Own

[JLester]

The site listed in my profile generates 5-8 million total pageviews each month and is entirely supported by advertising. We have a slightly unique take on things though. For one, we charge a flat rate per month, not based on CPM (the supposed industry standard which never made sense to me). We have two plans, Standard and Premium. Standard advertisers get about 5,000 impressions per day depending on traffic and # of active advertisers. Premiums get about double that and are shown at a higher priority.

We started out using outside services like Flycast, Burst, etc. during the .com boom and did fairly well. They never sold to our target companies though so we got mostly Run Of Network (RON) ads that were very low paying.

When the bottom dropped, we started selling our own ads. We started out with companies that used our forums or were recommended by our users. As traffic grew and advertisers reported great success with our site, we began having advertisers contact us rather than us trying to sell it to them. Bear in mind that this took several years to get to the point that the site is entirely paid for by advertising. We started in July 1997, started advertising in May 1999, and finally started paying all the bills in 2000. I wouldn't want to start something new at this point unless I could sustain several months (years?) of losses. Remember that the advertisers won't come until the users and traffic are already there. Most of our advertisers sell fairly expensive items as well .. $400+ average I would think. One or two sales a month and it pays off for them. Lower ticket items might not do as well.

To sum up, don't even think that ad networks will pay off, sell your own ads, and target companies that are directly related to your site content.

Jason