Generating Revenue with On-Line Ads?

ratajik asks: "In my continuing quest to generate revenue from my open source project, I've been attempting to use on-line ads. What are other Slashdot users' experiences with on-line ads? Which are the best methods (presentation, click-through, purchase, etc.), and which are the best companies that you've deal with?" "I've tried several at this point, and have had the best result from Google's AdSense - but even that hasn't been great. I've gone the user-most-purchase route with Connection Junction, but with 498,000 impressions in 1 month, have had zero sales. AdSense has worked a lot better (as users just need to click through), but I'd like to see a higher Clickthrough rate. What other companies have you dealt with and what has your experience been? What have you found to be the best type of Ad and Ad placement on your site? What management and tracking tools have you found that work best? If you've rolled your own web ads (e.g., not using an aggregator), what did you use to do it and how did you find advertisers?I've personally tried staying away from ads on my web sites, but some of the AdSense-type ads are minimally annoying, and seem like a good way to generate a bit of revenue off of free software, especially considering Internet advertising revenue was at a record 2.3 billion in the first quarter of 2004."

Comments

Old school

[agent dero]

It'll be damn near impossible to generate much revenue from your site through those type-of-ads.

The best bet would to setup a donation button, and point out that your project survives off donations.

Or if your product is nifty enough, and many folks use it, pay-for-support.

At last resort, you can put a neato logo on a t-shirt for cafepress.com ;)

Re:Old school

[Spudley]

Hmmm..... Cafepress has not worked for me. I'm sure others have done well from it, but I think to make more than the tiniest amount from it, you're going to have to put quite a bit of work into it.

I agree with you about Google adsense - it's hardly earning an earth shattering amount, but it is earming a lot more for me than cafepress.

I think the popularity of these two speaks for itself. I've tried a few others, but in all honesty, I don't think there is anything else out there in the general market that is earning money for web sites. You might get something that works better if it's specifically targetted to your site, but in general, my advice is to stick with google adsense, and be happy with what you get.

Most of the other advertising services won't get you as much, and despite the large amount quoted, most of the money going into the advertising industry is staying there.

Finally, I wouldn't bother with donations either, unless you have an insane amount of traffic. It won't get you much, and it'll make you feel cheap when you do get anything.

You're asking /. ?

[YrWrstNtmr]

The best type of ads to display on your website?

You're asking the bastion of ad blocking/workarounds/avoidance? The very center of "free"?

Dude...you are gonna get so flamed.

looking at

[way2trivial]

http://www.google.com/
"Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages"

so, advertising revenue, by one count, averages 50 cents, per web page, per year...

beat 50c per page at your site, in a year, and count yourself lucky....

content

[austad]

I think it mostly comes down to the content of the site when using Google's Adsense. As you know, they automatically pick the ads for your site based upon the content of it. If your site is about knitting, then it displays ads for knitting. Which also means that you probably won't get paid much for a clickthrough.

However, if your site is about Luxury cars or expensive network equipment, you will most likely much more money per clickthrough. As I mentioned in another post, I get $1 to $7 per clickthrough, however, I'm lucky if I get one or two clickthroughs per day. The demand just isn't that high for stuff like that. Now if I was running pr0n banners on a site that served pr0n, I'd probably get a ton more clickthroughs, but probably a fraction of a cent for each one.

Does anyone besides advertisers like ads?

[timminator]

Basing your business on some imaginary market of users with an insatiable appetite of clicking ads all day doesn't really make much sense in the OpenSource arena.

Try making money the proven, old fashioned way by focusing on delivering goods and/or services that have a profitable value proposition for your customers.

Your Logic Is Quite Flawed

[tomblackwell]

There is no guarantee that every one of those pages has advertising on it. You would have a much more reasonable number if you took the total count of pages with advertising and divided by the total take.