Forums

bannered

[Roman]

Is it good for companies like CJ or Fastclick to have Publishers who put banners on forums.
I don't see anything wrong with it but Fastclick says:
Fastclick does not accept websites that:
7. Consist mostly of forums (chat, message boards, etc.);

My site isn't mostly of forums but I feel like Advertisers dont like it...
Is that true? Why?

[Brad]

High impression rate and traditionally a poor click through ratio.

People are too busy reading and typing to be clicking on the banners. :)

[Roman]

Yep, it says it all :)
I had no experience with these companies. Do they have
banners which don't count impressions(only cpc counts)?

[edited by: Roman at 11:51 pm (utc) on April 12, 2003]

[nativenewyorker]

Another reason that advertisers shun forums is the lack of control over the content of those pages. Depending on the type of board, you may find people using obscenities, flaming each other or posting inappropriate topics that may reflect negatively on the advertiser.

Ted

[Roman]

I had no experience with these companies. Do they have
banners which don't count impressions(only cpc counts) or cpm is too low?

[firstmark]

There are other networks that do support forum traffic.

Clixgalore and Clickxchange come to mind.

[chiyo]

Advertising often appeals to those who cant find "free answers" to their questions on the pages they are on. Therefore with a static info page, there is a good chance that a paid ad will get a click. I agree that with a forum ads have to compete with other actions, often far more able to provide instant gratification, therefore the previous poster i think was spot on, saying that forum pages are a bit too "busy" to provide good ROI for advertisers. On many forums an advertiser also has to compete with participants dropping urls and getting "free" advertising.

On a forum there is the opportunity and the motivation to interact and ask a question to get an answer. Part of the reason for click throughs on forums to be low. Basically the less interactive the page, the higher the click through on the ads - to provide "missing" info - at a price of course.

If an ad provides a service or product that one cannot get for "free" from that site or page, or at a markedly higher level of reliability or quality, it can get high click throughs.

Also forums overall have a different demographic from a "job blow consumer surfer" who is just out there primed to purchase a product or service. Forums tend to be populated (though i accept there is a vast range) by younger people, and people who are willing to give more time to web surfing and are more experienced in the web (and therefore more likely to be able to find 'free' or 'lower cost' alternatives to paid products and services). There are also more likely to be people whose main motivation for using the web is social (chatting, emailing, etc) rather than to look expressly for "things to buy".

For an example we run our own ads on both our content vs forum sections. The click through (and closing of sales) for the forum impressions are very neglible compared to our content pages.

With the popularity of open source forum software there are thousands of opportunities for "free" chat or discussion, though from observation only a very small percentage of these actually are able to build any degree of self-sustaining community. That of course is 99.9% of the work - like you see on WebmasterWorld. On these small number of sites, carefully selected targeted ads may have a higher click though, just from the credibility that the forum itself conveys on them.