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

I work for an advertising company...

[neiras]

... and any of the salespeople will tell you, targeting is key. Find a company that doesn't simply sell you blocks of "anonymous" impressions. Ask about their audience. Ask about ad 'inventory' that is targeted at people that are interested in your product's general area. It's usually better to buy clicks rather than impressions - you're more likely to get interest from people who have already clicked on your ad! Also, stay on top of your campaigns. If you aren't converting, call the advertising company and ask for it to be re-trafficked or re-targeted. Otherwise you'll get absolutely raped.

No Flash

[MBCook]

I must say, my personal pet peeve would have to be flash ads. You can see them everywhere. Slashdot pages tend to have them, but even worse are the sites where you can have 3 or 4 on screen at once.

They suck CPU, they are often just plain annoying (flashing and such, no pun intended). Many times they are doing things that a simple animated GIF could do. I think there are MUCH better uses for Flash than ads, and I wish companies would get that through their heads.

There are many ways to generate revenue. Google AdWords (as mentioned in the submission), a "Donate" button (as mentioned in another post), blackmailing, whatever. But please, don't allow flash ads.

Re:No Flash

[GeorgeH]

Try FlashBlock, which will stop Flash animations from playing unless you click the Play button.

My experinces

[arrow]

There are pretty much 3 levels of advertising:

Top Tier - TribalFusion, Burst Media, etc.
Highest payoff, you want to work with these guys, but they are very picky. Tribal for instance only represents 5000 or so sites. You need to be pushing 20k+ sets of eyeballs (not just impressions, but individual people) a day before they will return your calls.

Second Tier - Google AdSense, MarketBanker, etc.
Below average payoff, but they will accept almost anyone with a legitimate site. But if your seeing less than 10k impressions a day, it will be a good 6 months to a year before you've made enough to get a check mailed to you.

Third Tier - AdDynamix, AllClicks, etc.
Bottom of the bucket pay rates. But they will take any impression they can get. When you hear people complain about things like skimming, and commissions not being paid, etc. these are the type of networks that are involved.

Long story short... It all comes down to traffic. 400k impressions per month may seem a lot, untill you try to make money off of that volume.

Your best bet for supporting an opensource project would be to solicit donations or sponsors. Failing that, try to sell your own ad space to companies that fall in your target group. (i.e. if your writing video card drivers, try getting a gaming site to advertise with you)

On the other hand, if you can create something that people love and use on a regular basis, you can support yourself off it. Right now I bring in more a month from Google AdSense than I do at my decent paying IT day job. I'm expecting even more when I convert all my inventory over to TribalFusion.

Re:Only way to go.

[ratajik]

Yep, I've made way more off donations then Ads at this point. But I'm average about .0011 cents per user. Well, download, hard to get a handle on actual daily users. Which is GREAT, I'm shocked and amazed people donated, but I wouldn't mind adding to that, if I can figure out a non-annoying way to do it :)

I've thought about doing a one-time pop-up. I'll give it a bit more thought before I release the next version :)

I've also thought of a related service that could (COULD) be subscription-based (not the actual product, but a web-based thing that some users might want in addition to it).

Subscriptions

[miyako]

You might think about something like a subscription service. For uses willing to fork over a token amount per month/6-months/year they see no ads and can (if they want) get e-mail updates about the latest versions, maybe other nice things. Of course depending on how your site is set up this might end up costing more to set up than it's worth.
It just seems to me that banner ads today are less about making money through view/clicks and more about making money by driving people to subscribe to an ad-free version of the site.

Re:Software and Money

[Kris_J]

I've actually considered embedding Ads in the main StationRipper window... but don't' know if that would be overly annoying.

Well, here's one data point for you. I won't install any application that does this unless I know I can turn them off either with an option, a hack or by buying the product if I know it's worth it even before I install it.

Eudora is the only product that does this that I use. I bought Opera for my N-Gage, but I've *never* installed the ad-sponsored version on any PC. Basically ad-sponsored==spyware.

Anyway, if yours is an open-source project -- someone will just compile an ad-free version.

Have you tried charging for support?

Re:Old school

[Seumas]

Unfortunately, donations don't always work. I run an auction site that has been around for many years and has quite a few users. However, the donations aren't even enough to keep up with the monthly expenses (which aren't a whole lot really).

You can't expect people to give money that they don't have, but it's still a difficult situation when people want your site to stay around and make frequent use of it (and it is based on monetary transactions between other users to begin with), but you're stuck paying for it out of pocket.

Personally, I've had a "no advertising" policy that I've held strictly to for more than five years. Nothing even resembling any type of advertising has ever plagued a single inch of my site. But upon investigation, a number of users commented that "hey, now that you mention it this site DOESN'T have any advertising or banners on it... I never noticed that before!".

Here I thought I was sticking to some lofty non-commercial "back to the old internet" goal by not accepting advertising or anything only to find out that the average internet user doesn't even notice when a site does not have ads.

The disapointing part of it is that sites like this can't continue once the main/only source of income (the admin/owner) loses their job. You can't pay out of pocket when those pockets are empty.

When it comes to software rather than websites... I think the best thing you can do is offer two versions for non and paying users or just ask for donations. If you stick ads in them, people will also suspect spyware and they will find ways to get rid of your ads on their end. It will drive a lot of people away to alternatives that are ad-free. I know that I am more likely to toss a few bucks at authors of software that I like when they have strong anti-ad/invasion practices from the beginning.

Best of luck to you.

Not a bad start ...

[Too Much Noise]

... you got the /. front page, that will generate some traffic ... erm ... provided your server can handle it. Now if you can use traffic logs to convince advertisers that your site is heavily visited, you may get a swing at ads ;-)

I rolled my own

[Randym]

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?

My site is affiliated with a local entertainment magazine. We are located in a town with a major public university. My boss is computer-phobic, so I am in charge of the website. It occurred to me that people advertising in our magazine could be posting ads on the website. During the school year we get about 60,000 pageviews/month; during the summer about 45,000.

I divided the website into 4 virtual directories with approximately equivalent pageviews so that people could target users based on what kind of pages they were looking at. Each of those directories has its own ads directory. The ads are strictly banner ads, and there is only one per page (at the top). I have never gotten any complaints from users about the ads, which are visible but unobtrusive.

In each of the 4 ad directories is 1 PHP page / advertiser. My algorithm counts the number of ads in the ad directory (actually it counts the number of pages in that directory with a .php extension), then randomly chooses one to display. (The ads themselves may point to a graphics directory one level deeper.) Needless to say, it is very useful to have executable PHP code in an ad.

I priced the ads pretty low (about $25/month to cover all four areas), but then found, much to my surprise, that the ad staff doesn't want to sell them because they won't make very much in commissions. However, I've been doing OK because people see an ad and call up to see if *they* can get one.

For the future, I'd like to write some code that enables advertisers to specify day and time selections (for example 75% of our traffic comes between 9-5 M-F). I am also thinking of rewriting the Restaurant Guide page so that I can toss up a random restaurant as an ad.

My business model is a little old-fashioned (impressions), but I am considering an alternative way of charging (clickthroughs, but with a higher price per clickthrough, compared to the price per impression). So far I am making very little money, but I am planning an offensive for this summer that entails contacting everyone who advertises in our magazine that also mentions a URL in their ad: "Got a website? Where is your traffic coming from?"

I hope that this was helpful.