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

Yeah

[daeley]

especially considering Internet advertising revenue was at a record 2.3 billion

How much you wanna bet that $2.2 billion of that was pr0n? ;)

Re:Yeah

[rice_web]

$500 million of the remaining billion was a user trying to get a free iPod by shooting the terrorist.

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

[lambent]

For an example of the donation button, check out:

The Donation Box at E2

Can anyone think of any other large, donation based projects that publish their revenues?

Also, Jonathan Rosenberg of Goats seems to have the whole 'pay me, pretty please' thing down pretty well. Just perusing his site should be a 101 course in internet capitalism.

It might help to describe what kind of project you're working on, to get a better sense of what sorts of commercial options would be most appropriate.

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.

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.

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.

Re:I work for an advertising company...

[Enfors]

Uhmm, I think you're misunderstanding. He doesn't want to advertise his product / service - he wants to put other people's ads on his web site.

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....

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.

Software and Money

[ratajik]

I've actually considered embedding Ads in the main StationRipper window... but don't' know if that would be overly annoying. And showing something like Google ads may be against the rules...

What I would really like to find is an aggregator that pays per impression... but DOESN'T do pop-ups, unders, animated ads with sound, etc. While most people use pop-up blockers these days, I refuse to do something that annoying.

Is there some OTHER way other open source developers are making money off of smaller products like this, besides donations and ads? I doubt the pay-for-support route will work for something like this. While I wouldn't ever expect to make a lot, it would be nice to cover costs + have a bit left over to invest in the next development machine.

I'm actually a bit of a cross-roads with the software. I've got some ideas to expanding it a lot, fix a lot of things users want fixed and add a lot of new function - but is it worth continuing down that path, or start working on something else that may be a bit more sales-oriented? So far I've done it 'cause I love programming and it was something interesting and useful to work on - but it's mostly been (lots) of support, and very little code as of late.

-Greg

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?

Only way to go.

[dtfinch]

Put a donate button on your web page and in the about box of the program (if it has one). Braham Cohen, author of BitTorrent, was very successful going one step further and giving users a one time popup reminder to donate. Something like "Have you made a donation yet?" and it sends you to a donation page if you click no.

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).

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.

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.

it don't work

[stonebeat.org]

trust me. you can not generate revenue from online ADs. Take Eric Raymond advice and sell mugs, t-shirts etc with your logo. That is better way to generate to revenue then to put AD banners. I used cafepress.com to create a online store to sell mugs and tshirts and it was pretty easy and effective.

Adsense is darn accurate, but sometimes funny ...

[xmas2003]

I run Adsense on my personal web site ... and am generally pleased with it - pays the hosting bills ... but I'm not retiring early, since on my good days, I can "Super-Size" it at McDonalds! ;-)

I don't pay too much attention to the ads since it kinda runs by itself, and my experience is that Google does a pretty darn good job targetting 'em ... but I sometimes get a bit of a chuckle out of what shows up - for instance, I have some Lunar Eclipse Pictures and one of the Adsense ads was some place selling real estate on the moon! ;-)

google

[austad]

I use Google Adsense on my site.

I tried a couple of others in the past with some other sites and made a big fat zero. But google is actually decent. I get one or two clickthroughs a day, and depending on the ad, I get anywhere from $1 to $7 PER clickthrough. I know this seems a bit high, but given the content, the advertisers stand to make a lot of money off a sale.

In any case, it comes close to paying my hosting costs each month, but not enough to actually buy me a new server or turn a profit of any kind.

Affiliate Programs

[Fished]

Consider doing an affiliate program with Amazon or someone like them. In the past, I did fairly well doing book reviews with affiliate links.

Avoid Connection Junction

[TheWanderingHermit]

I have a site in a field totally unrelated to computers. It was ranked as an "Editor's Choice" (or something like that) on AOL at one point. From my server logs, I KNOW it gets a fair amount of traffic (I also have free downloads, logs show these files are downloaded -- and the pages linking to the files are viewed).

I wanted to see if I could make enough to at least pay for hosting, and looked around and settled on trying Connection Junction. I don't remember for sure, but I think I was supposed to get paid on click-throughs.

For the next few months, I was getting a good number of page views, but according to Connection Junction, their banners received 4-6 impressions per month, way off from what my server logs showed for page views. Maybe they're honest, but after that experience (seeing my logs showing hundreds of page views per month and CJ showing 4-6 impressions/banner views for the same month), I don't trust them.

Re:Avoid Connection Junction

[Zerth]

Conjunction junction doesn't pay by impression, they pay, depending on the ad, by clickthrough or by number of "actions", which is usually either an actual sale or the viewer filling out a form. A company I just interviewed with uses them and they only pay per sale.

As it was explained to me, it's not entirely as assholish as it sounds, the sale doesn't have to come by clickthrough, it just has to be within a certain time of the impression. Well, unless all your site's viewers block the cookie, then you're screwed.

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.

1997 called

[notsoclever]

They want their business model back.

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 ;-)

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.

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.

Have a dollar...

[k4_pacific]

I just went to your site and clicked on an ad.