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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."
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?
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
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
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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.
... 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.
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.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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
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.
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.
symetrix. We are building a religion, a limited edition.
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.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
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.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
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! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
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.
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They want their business model back.
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
... 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 ;-)
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.
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.
I just went to your site and clicked on an ad.
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