Forum Moderators: skibum
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I'm the boss of snipped. We cover film, music and politics. Mostly film. We'd been moving up in traffic very steadily, and I expected to hit 1 million page views per month near the end of the year. Then--whamo. A piece on our site just exploded. We had our best day ever yesterday: 36,000 unique users and 188,000 page views. The site's been going crazy for 2 weeks and, based on similar, but smaller scale surges in the past, we expect to come out of this with at least 1-2 million monthly page views on a regular basis. And, of course, we expect to continue growing on top of that.
So, we had to get a dedicated server. We need to pay for that, plus we wouldn't mind cashing in a bit. A few problems/questions.
I've applied for Adsense, based on strong recommendations here. However, there is a chance we will be rejected for "excessive profanity," or perhaps our "glossary of porn." I suppose I'll find out soon enough, but the point is we can't count on adsense.
We've been an amazon affiliate in the past. We had almost no success. I've heard the same from other movie review sites. Unless someone has a suggestion on how to do better with amazon, we're done with it.
We've offered banner ads on our own. It's only been four days, but no bites. We're charging $95 for 10% of our traffic, with 100,000 impressions minimum guaranteed. This seems like a great offer to me. What would be the "standard" rate here? How long has it taken others to sell space in such a way? I've considered snailing potential clients, primarily record labels and movie studios with webalyzer and alexa print outs (i know alexa sucks, but it's something.) I figure I should wait until the end of sept. for that, when our stats are more stable. Good idea? Anyone had success with it?
Which ad brokers have worked best for you? I've applied for tribalfusion already, but, as with adsense, there's a chance they won't like our naughty language. Also, a 45% commision sure seems like a big bite.
We've been debating about our total revenue potential at Ruthless HQ. Anyone care to venture an educated guess as to what we could/should haul in with this type of site and this type of traffic? Any tips or ideas, greatly appreciated.
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 5:30 pm (utc) on Aug. 22, 2004]
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apply for tribalfusion and adsense, as long as you do have content, most will probably be okay with accepting you.
we have a reasonably successful site, and we get 1.2TB of month bandwidth, 2.4ghz celeron cpu, 1gig of ram, all for under 100$ a month.. I'd go look at some webhosting forums/etc and find a much better deal.
Our hosting is 1,000 gigs for $99/mo. They have excellent customer service according to our webmaster. But we wind up having to pay more for maintanance and so forth. I'll look into your recomendations.
Also as far as Ad Brokers, you might want to try Gorilla Nation. I haven't used them myself, but they seem popular among film related sites.
A mod beat me to the punch, but thanks for the heads up.
Speaking of bandwidth, it seems you could save a lot by reducing your image load. Page coding could be better too but you won't be able to reduce as much.
While you don't want to ruin what makes your site appealing to your visitors, the images seemed really large in size (I'm talking kb not width X height). I saw one page that had a bunch of medium sized images really far down the scroll. It seems silly to ask for donations to pay for bandwidth to deliver images that hardly anyone even sees.
In my totally worthless opinion you need to decide if it's worth it to clean up the content and try to make a site like onion, fark , drudge etc...which I am assuming make some money or cross over to the dark side and add more adult content and try to make a few bucks in that arena.
Thanks for the compliments mr. speed. I suggested that our webmaster take down the porn glossary while we're being evaluated by google, then put it back up, since they'll probably never look again, but he's a stubborn SOB. Based on the feedback we get, and the pages that do the best, our filthiness is a huge part of our appeal. Yet linking to adult sites or puting up adult content is a significant door to open, because after that we'd have zero chance with mainstream advertisers. You're right. It's a predicament.
Try adding a link on your front page about advertising rates for text links (due to transfer of PR and better CTR, many prefer these to banners); lots of folks do well selling ads directly and cutting out the middleman.
If you didn't have success with Amazon, avoid DVD-selling afilliate programs. However, Netflix and the other membership rental companies have affiliate programs that I seem to remember paying about $10 per sign up. Also, there are lots of big name stores selling plasma tvs, lcd tvs, iPods, dvd players, etc with affiliate programs. If you could find a way to work reviews of that kind of stuff in with your movie content, you'd probably do well.
Regarding the Adsense question, you should be careful cheating the system: you can do some months with good revenues and make some investment (severs, contents...). Suddenly, you can receive too the "dreaded mail" and find yourself with a bunch of pending invoices and no income.
You may not wish to go down that road. In the meantime give some dating affiliate programs a try. Most of them pay either a dollar for a free sign-up or have a rev-share program. You could even try gambling and other sites along those lines depending on your countries laws. Try as many programs out as possible and see what works. I think you can do better than $1000 a month.
I do agree with Mauricio on the whole breaking TOS thing. Don't do it.
