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Up to this point, the site has been non-commercial and ad-free, supported solely by donations from the users. As the developer (Apache/mod_perl/Embperl/MySQL) I've been running the site for six years now, as it has slowly grown to the current state of having 900 journals and over 70,000 pictures in the database. It's a nice community, very niche.
I have been thinking recently about how to make the site more self-supporting, since it takes up a lot of my time and it would be nice if it could make me enough money to be able to live without having to go get a "real" job, which would mean seriously curtailing the amount of effort I could put in on developing the website, fixing problems and so on. I figure currently the low-end figure to achieve this is around $2500 per month.
After much debate (I hate ads) I finally tried Google AdSense, and it seems initially to be making around $20-$30 per day. This is nice pocket money, but it's not enough to live on and the ads themselves leave a lot to be desired - they tend to be very non-relevant. For example, there are a lot of medical-related ads, I think because of the word "journal", which tends to be related to medicine.
In any case, I am thinking about trying to implement the ads myself, in a very similar style to the Google AdSense text-only format. This would mean approaching advertisers in the cycling and bike touring industry; it would also mean developing the ad functionality on the site, which is not all that difficult.
I am thinking to use a top-of-the-page banner area, split into 4 cells across the page. Each cell will be able to contain a small text ad. Each ad would be purchased based on CPM. I think that given the current traffic of 1M requests per month, a CPM of $0.80 for each cell would give 0.8 x 4 x 1000 = $3200 per month gross. I prefer CPM to PPC because the fraud potential inherent in PPC seems to be a big problem these days, and CPM just seems like a much simpler model to use.
I think the website is focused enough on a niche topic that it should be attractive to companies in the bicycle touring / cycling world in general.
I am a programmer, not a marketer. I can deal with people, but it's not my area of expertise. I'm very aware that companies and consultants spend every waking hour doing this kind of thing, so I am wondering: Would I be totally insane to try to do this myself? I am wondering, in essence, if it is a worthy or attainable goal to make my website (and, by extension, myself) self-supporting by attempting to find advertisers directly. I know it all comes down to my own ability to convince people, but I thought I'd throw this out there and see what people think.
One last thing: I am in the process of taking the template that I have developed and extending it so that I can have different sites with the same structure, but focused on other topics. For example, hiking, organic living, politics, any topic that I think might make for an interesting, focused community. So obviously for each of these topics there is a potential whole world of advertisers. I feel optimistic that I should be able to find companies interested in putting ads on such a site, but is this realistic today? How about my projected CPM? Is this too high, too low, or is it impossible to say without more information?
Advice much appreciated...
Thanks,
-Neil
[edited by: eljefe3 at 2:09 am (utc) on Mar. 25, 2006]
[edit reason] no URL's please [/edit]
It might make sense to see if any of the networks offer such stuff first as this would involve a lot less effort on your part.
If this approach doesn't work, then by all means try contacting the sellers yourself, but again try and do a deal based on a percentage of sales from customers clicking through from your site rather than just selling ads. This means no upfront cost to the sellers which is a much more attractive, win-win proposition.
There is just a small subset of the industry that does affiliate programs, so I'd be missing out on a whole bunch of companies. I get the impression that certain kinds of affiliate programs work very well (e.g. real estate, cars, insurance, big ticket items) because there are bigger sums involved and thus a purchase results in much better income. But for cycling, I'm really not so sure.
Affiliate linking is geared very much toward short-termism, i.e. does someone buy something *immediately* after clicking over to the merchant (or during that cookie session). I think advertising was more traditionally about raising awareness of your company and brand. Then when people who have seen your ads repeatedly over time have to make a buying decision at some point in the future, they remember your brand and they are more inclined to buy it. I see that approach as being more flexible, since it doesn't depend on the person making a purchase *right now*.
The affiliate programs are geared more toward the merchant's convenience, since they don't pay anything if people don't buy on the spot. The CPM model is geared more toward me, the content provider, since I get paid regardless of whether someone clicks over and buys something right away. On the other hand, with the CPM ads, who can say that this person won't remember the merchant's site, and go back there later to buy a tent when they need one? Brand awareness is a subtle thing.
But then, I could of course try using both approaches, with some of the ads actually being posted by me, with the affiliate link (i.e. no expiration or charge to the merchant for the ad), and others being CPM ads that they pay for directly. I could try starting out with some of the affiliate ads and see how they go. Since I am controlling the ads, I can do whatever I want there! Mixing CPM and affiliate ads doesn't present any problems for the user, I guess - though I should probably put some kind of indication in the ad box as to what sort of ad it is.
I'm really not impressed with Google AdSense so far. The ads being shown on my site are irrelevant, Google doesn't seem to be learning about the site very quickly, the link units at the bottom of the pages never seem to show up, and to cap it all off the income is fairly uninspiring too - it's going from $20 a day (woohoo!) to $17 and $10 yesterday. True, I know this is a lot more than many sites make, but it's nowhere near being something I could remotely live on. And with the irrelevance of the ads, that just makes it even more useless.
Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, it's all a learning process for me. I will probably try approaching some companies that have affiliate programs, but I am not sure yet if they will allow me the freedom to put their links in the box format that I will be having - at first glance they seem a little restrictive on how you use the links.
I am still interested in hearing opinions on my specific CPM target of $0.80 per ad, with four ads in a line across the page (like how Google AdSense does their text ads). Is this a reasonable starting point?
Thanks again,
-Neil
I have heard about the affiliate programs
I am still interested in hearing opinions on my specific CPM target of $0.80 per ad
I am still interested in other views and particularly experiences, as it is an area that I wish to explore within the near future.
[edited by: eljefe3 at 3:48 am (utc) on Mar. 27, 2006]
The ad system I am building is integrated right into the HTML of the page (all my pages are dynamically generated), since I am doing it all myself it's just another part of the template and looks like any other bit of HTML. No third party sites, nice and simple. I actually got it working last night in a couple of hours; I can now create ads (as the administrator) and have them shown across the top of the page, same as Google, random 4 ads per impression. I count views, and clicks. Not very hard to do really, if you already are in the business of building dynamic web pages. It's not live yet, I'm waiting until I have some actual ads to serve, but otherwise it's pretty much ready to go. I really like the idea of having full control over the format, content etc of the ads. I think anybody who really cares about the look and feel of their site would feel the same way.
Next up, the really difficult part, which is getting real people to part with real money... thanks for the example CPM rates, maybe $0.80 is too high but my eCPM on AdSense has varied in the short time it's been up between $0.37 on slow days (like today) and $1.07 on better days (middle of the week). I figure I start on the higher end of what I need and go down from there as necessary... I have a feeling that the problem won't be so much the price itself ($0.80 vs $0.50) but rather getting the person to sign up for the ads at all. I may have to do some kind of special deal where I give the first n customers free ads for the first month or two, just to get the thing going. I can then show it to other people, and they can see who else is on there, and that might make them more inclined to join.
Thanks again,
-Neil
So, what do you call "very cheap" CPM?
$0.80 CPM sounds quite reasonable for a targetted market such as yours. Don't compare it directly to AdSense because you aren't factoring in Google's take. If your AdSense report shows you made $1.00 CPM, the real CPM is probably $1.30 or $1.40, something like that. And if you say Google is delivering untargetted ads, imagine if the ads were on target, the CPM would likely be even higher. If I were you I really wouldn't go below $0.80 CPM, except to lure in new advertisers if you're having trouble getting them. Don't sell yourself short!
Bear in mind that I've never done what you're attempting to do, although I am planning on it for a new site. Showing the same ad to the same person only once is not an idea I was considering. Many people click on an ad the second, third or fourth time they see it, rather than the first. Also, if you're going to show the same person the same ad multiple times but only charge it against the advertiser as one impression, you should spell that out and raise your CPM rates! That's a big give-away to the advertiser, and not typically how CPM advertising works, at least in my understanding.
(affiliate ads) Do they require JavaScript in order to work?
It was quite some months ago that I read the detail, and cannot now give you any links, but (from memory) some Java was dropped on consumer computers. From that point on, any affiliate ads clicked by the user had it's affiliate id rewritten. Naturally, the people dropping the Java got paid, rather than the organisation hosting the ad.
The info answered 2 questions for me:
Check to see if any of the estabished publications in your field maintain websites with ads; if so, you may be surprised at their cpm prices. At least that's what I've noticed in our niche: the offline media charge $8 to $50/cpm, which is far more than Adsense generates, and more than anyone but these media giants can possibly charge.
As someone else suggested, take a close look at phpAdsNew; it is free software that might be very useful, particularly since you will need the ability to rotate ads, keep track of how many impressions each advertiser has received, etc.
I think I will be linking through directly to the advertiser's website, rather than going through a "goto" script on my end. This means I won't be able to count clicks, but then again with the "per month" model it won't matter so much. One of the businesses I spoke to said that they will be able to track clicks from my site anyway via their own weblog referer analysis software, which I'm guessing most sites have. This keeps things simple; I don't have to keep click stats, they pay for a certain time period, everybody's happy...
I'll keep you updated on how this goes. $50 per month isn't great, obviously, but if I manage to get 20 advertisers then that would be a start, around $1000 per month. Better than AdSense, anyway...
Thanks,
-Neil
Solved that when we started charging - now there is a cost involved we get the changes. Focuses the minds I guess.
Due to our market we just offered simple 12 month rates in simple boxes. We did try tele-sales for a while which was a waste of time.
Now we just have a simple form, if you have the exposure - traffic etc then they will come to you.
We have a girl part-time to check all is OK, we do the ads, she send invoices, chases the money, renewals etc.
We have large, medium and small firms advertising. The larger ones will see you accept ads ( do a advertise with us page) and normally email rather than use the form as they will have specific requirements.
We did it manually at first but now we have a database/backend admin system that adds the adverts. Next stage is too allow advertisers to create their own accounts and pay online.
With yearly paymnents you get monies upfront.
the mistake we made was we should have gone straight to a database system when we first started.!
