Forum Moderators: skibum
Brett:
The affiliate sell off is already happening. So is the big kickout from advertisers. I've talked to several people who've been kicked out of Flycast/engage and quite a few from Burst.
Burst? Really? I have a message on my answering machine from Engage asking me to sign in on SiteRegistry and approve the new contract terms (they take 60% now), but I'm not too worried about losing them. I had already cut them back to 250K impression/mo and that's, what, $170 a month now? Big deal.
At those rates, I can afford to play around. I've tossed in a few affiliate banners, none of them have done anything great, though I am getting 1.8 CTR on one or two programs that have good creative.
text links:
I'm mixing text links and buttons, in part for design. My largest revenue producer is a text link, that's for certain. I actually built the site with them in mind, so the theme is there. All in all, I'd have to say that text links are providing the best overall results.
I get the feeling we are at the bottom of the crash. Things tend to have a balance, and with the internet only getting stronger and growing, we are destined to rebound. (call me optimisitic)
People are starting to figure out that they need to use innovative methods, such as interactive and media rich banners, instead of just throwing money. (There is a banner for the palm 3 on SEW with a kaliedescope effect that absolutely drew my click, and check out [bluestreak.com ] for other examples.) These and other forms, such as the interstitials that are slowly preloaded in the background while you surf a site, and then instantly get your attention with audio/video, show how effective an online ad can be.
Just as semi-successful content sites lose their ability to survive on banners, affiliate sites that don't really know how to draw the right traffic and convert it, will also hit the morgue. On a positive note, at least it will eliminate some competition. The strong will survive.
As e-com companies build better business plans, and as investors get better at picking them, more companies will be spending more on advertising. Eventually.
I think (and this is, of course, just gut-feel speculation) that we will ride the bottom of this through the first quarter, and as companies and investors starting getting their act together throughout the second quarter, we will see a pickup in advertising in general, possibly modified in format, for somewhat sunnier skies in the third quarter.
Wheeler
Let me know if you have any more questions.
Reworking my free stuff site over the past few days, I now realize how much worse things have gotten. My last update was around mid January, and things were much better back then.
BannerBroker CPMs are still rock bottom, and they rarely accept new sites.
General Interest/Entertainment stuff is dead. A lot of these type of sites are just trying to cover server costs - many not succeeding.
Sites are falling by the wayside left and right, without much noise, since they are small, indepently owned sites. Even though they generated thousands of pageviews per day, the revenue is gone, and now so are they.
The free stuff site still makes money, but it's getting to the point of not being worth the time to update.
It is getting harder and harder for sites without a specific topic/theme/niche to make it. Does anyone see any recovery in the general interest/entertainment sector?
No and I'm still searching. I've pretty much given up on one site of mine that is still pulling in A LOT lot of referrals from the SE's. So much wasted traffic that could be put to good use but can't because there are hardly any good affiliate programs left to sign-up on.
There are still a few left but should I spend weeks building something that will only turn-around 10-20 U$S a day total?
I've asked many of them to PLEASE create the option of text-only ads without any fancy graphics, customizable text preferrably. Also showed them various click-thru percentages on text vs. banners. I even went so far as to show them the good sales results that followed.
Instead of pondering these ideas, they turned their backs and stated that the only affiliate ads we can use are on cj.com or reporting.net, etc. It seems that the only thing they are concerned about is having their brand or logo displayed on the affiliate's site. Let the customer decide from there, they say. The logo/brand ads are so cheesy and vague that hardly anyone clicks on them, much less give them a glance.
I agree, many of them are just in it for the branding. Another merchant trick.
Hopefully the new CJ info will shed some light on this, with the new Open Marketplace. Trying programs out for a while only to find they make very little is growing old fast.
You must have signed up for that "Cleo the psychic" affiliate program, Drastic. I swear that I almost posted a "Drastic, what's the future for entertainment sites?" thread just yesterday.
Like msgraph, I see NO recovery for this genre. The carnage is incredible, and the toll is now becoming more than obvious. Two affiliate forums you and I used to frequent have been decimated and the posts are either the death rattles of veterans or naive 'So, how do I make money?' queries by newbies arriving late to the party -very late.
Or worse, spending precious work time adding the banners/link code to various pages only to receive the "notice of death" two weeks later.
Yes, you almost have to go SSI or external .js to manage affiliate code now. Of course, the best performers are text blended with content in context, so that pretty much mandates hand-coding for those.
LOL, yup.
Every time I go through that site and update it, it takes several days (while doing other things like hanging out here.) Every time I get finished, something I just added or tweaked gets a toe-tag, without fail. This time was no exception, one of the worst.
The problem I'm having is due to the fairly restrictive nature of my site, there aren't that many 'topic affiliates'. And i'd probably have trouble convincing bigger companies that could apply (like Amazon)!
You're right, independant website owners have a tough life!
Alex
This isn't always possible, and you can use banners. However, you could also just use a text ad in place of the banner - just put the ad in the banner area, using plain text on the same background as your page. This will draw a lot more attention and clicks than a banner.
Using odd-sized banners draws more clicks as well. Buttons and half-sized banners have traditionally outperformed the standard 468x60. I am sure the skyscrapers are doing well too.
Why do you think you couldn't partner with Amazon? They have one of the biggest affiliate programs, and you can link to any page or product in their site. In fact if you link directly to a book, you get 15% commission on sales of that item, compared to the usual 5%.
