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? ;)

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.

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.

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.

1997 called

[notsoclever]

They want their business model back.