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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'."
What companies that resell advertising space are -reliable- in their payments?
This is the wrong place to ask. I highly recommend that you contact the experts!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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.
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Most sites that support themselves solely off advertising are hurting bigtime right now. I used to work for a place where a large portion of their revenue was from ads, but now, even though they are doing more advertising, the income it generates is negligible.
Why not come up with something that people are willing to pay for? Something on the order of $1 a month per subscriber is much more than you will get from advertising. Plus, at $1 a month, it's not like it's going to break the bank for anyone. Of course, you would need to charge them once for like $12 for the whole year, otherwise your credit card fees would take most of your money.
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Funny you should ask this question as just today I got a love-not from my main avertising broker saying they wern't going to pay me as much anymore.
Anyway, I'm reminded of something someone else once told me on this front: "making money on a web site is easy; doing it without pissing off your users is hard.", and that's the truth.
Web advertising is harder then ever, at least from a publishers perspective; the breadth of sites and users that are around now make it hard to command any great sum from advertisers; Even popup ads, the little darlings of the IAB, seldom pay more than $2 per thousand.
To make a living like, say, Slashdot you either need to be lucky enough to sign on with a large advertising death floatilla (tribalfusion, 247realmedia, etc) or hire an avertising broker/PR agent to sell your site to advertisiers; These sign-up-on-a-web-page dealies sound good and by and large are goods but don't scale well when it comes to paying $1500 a month in expenses not including money for you to live on. They are good for making a little on the side, not for financing a lifestyle.
You asked "How much can a moderately popular site expect to earn from advertising revenue?". The answer as I've seen it is, unless you have a very, very, very tight demographic, the answer is not much. If your site is already running, monitor it's ranking on Alexa and see where you stand. Also, how do you define "moderately popular"? The answer varries widely depending on who you ask: A little while ago when I was lookign for advertisers, Advertising.com wouldn't even talk to me unless I had a 100,000 pageviews a day, and they consider that a "small site".
I guess what I'm trying to say is unless you have huge readership, you'll need some sort of specialized demographic (read: gimmick) to attract users and advertisers.
Also, remember that income is net: today being USA tax day and all you need to remember that you've gotta pay taxes on your monies, too, and that takes a big piece out.
If you're hell bent on doing this for a living you need to get lucky and cheat to win. Let's pick on Slashdot some more, shall we? Contrary to popular belief, it did not get popular based on those early Nude photos of Pater: it got popular largely based on riding the popularity wave of Linux and the Open Source zeitgeist. If you can find something similar, something that you can tune into, you'll stand a fighting chance.
Actually, I have no idea what I'm saying, I'm just rambling.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
... with a German geek-toys site à la thinkgeek. Since I hadn't the money to build up the logistic part around it, I tried it as a reseller. I found a good (German) affilate program (zanox), that lets me choose products out of the participant's catalogues and get a revenue of 5% of every sold item. Additionally, every participant delivers a couple of banners in every needed format.
I mix the affilate program with amazon stuff, using their reseller program and make the products the content of the site.
Using movabletype and keeping in mind some main ideas of google in mind (search terms in filename and in the header, etc.) I finaly made my site to appear on top in google using some interesting keywords (dialer blocker (a tool to stop troyan horses dialing expensive numbers), div x or mx 700).
Additionally, I show banner ads. I show both, valueclick banners from external sponsors and 'internal' ones (sending the users to products or shops of the affiliate program or even sending them to the bestsellers of my site).
The content based ads are making around 3/4 of the money, the rest is devided in 4/5 of the affiliate banners and 1/5 (only a couple of Euros per month) through valueclick.
All in all, I have around 1500 visitors per month generating around 140.000 hits. It pays the traffic, but not my work (I've to post at least one new product a day).
The most important thing is that I have two other software products (ImagePuzzler and ImageDupe) I can advertise for on my site. Since ImageDupe's website is an often linked site and ImageDupe links back to futuregeek.de I got a little 'google-bonus' from it.
All ads and clicks (even the valueclick's) are tracked using phpAdsNew and 99% of my visitors come from google, the rest is yahoo, lycos and a german meta search engine. Since I don't trust webalizer (especially the search engine identifier), I wrote my own script, that keeps an eye on the referers.
If you're running it as a hobby, don't expect to earn anything serious. Trust me, I know. :-(
Sure, you can set up advertising, banners, pop-ups, merchandise, blah-di-blah-di-blah, but unless you're prepared to put in a lot of time, you simply won't get much out of it.
In order to make a significant amount from web advertising, you will need to keep a careful eye on which ads are earning and which aren't. You'll need to constantly add new ads, and purge the ones that aren't working. You'll need to keep in touch with the latest trends - what are people clicking on, and why, and change your adverts to follow the trends.
Put simply, if it's a hobby, you're not likely to have time to put in the effort required to make money from it.
Putting up a simple banner ad might get you a small amount of income - it depends on just how popular your site actually is ("moderately popular" is not a well defined amount), and also whether you're willing to sell your soul and advertise gambing sites and dodgy credit cards (these two categories will earn you about ten times anything else, but I still refuse to advertise them).
The other idea that might work for you (depending on what your site actually has on it) is merchandising. If your site is suitable for merchandising, may I humbly recommend you visit CafePress, and start selling mugs and t-shirts with your logo. I have actually managed to make a bit of money from this, where advertising failed dismally. (also not much, but again I'm not putting in any real time to actively market them)
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
I have a small website (aspectscripting.com) that caters to users of Procomm Plus (terminal emulation software that I used to test and still use every day) and its ASPECT scripting language. I bought some ads through google.com, that combined with the regular Google cataloging of my site, seems to have done a good job of drawing users to my site (Google appears much higher as a referrer than other search engines).
.com site I used to create and manage my ads. The ads offered here are not the higher-traffic ad that you posted the google.ca link to. The ads I have through google.com appear on the right-hand side of the Google search window, clearly marked as a sponsored link. You only pay for an ad when someone clicks on it, of course. Google debits my credit card monthly for the ads I have active, and I'm able to monitor the status of the ads nearly real-time. Google requires that your clickthrough rate be no lower than .5%, but I have only had that problem with one ad that was getting massive search hits but little clicks.
https://adwords.google.ca/select/ is the Canadian version of the
Don't just plan on web advertising revenue. Think of other creative ways to make some dough. We have been pretty successful with the Amazon Affiliate program. We even added some stuff to Slashcode that allows the authors to very easily link to Amazon products in the stories. Some of the readers don't like it, but you could denote those links with an icon or something. Most of our readers are tolerant and understand that we need to make some money. Most months our Amazon income beats or banner ad income.
Another thing that worked well for us was a biweekly or monthly book/product list that we worked into the left column of the site. Also, work directly with related companies to advertise their product for either a monthly fee or product donations.
All that said, unless you plan to be really big, don't plan on actually making any profit. At MacSlash we're happy that the site makes enough for us to go to a convention or two each year.