How much to charge?

[adds21]

I run a reasonably established financial website, and have been using Adsense over the last few years to generate a small income.

This morning, I received an email from a commercial financial site who are interested in advertising on my site. Reading between the lines, I think they’re looking for a mention in an article (kinda like product placement I guess). After having a route around the web for information about them I’ve decided that I’m reasonably happy to do it.

However, I have no idea how much to charge for this kind of advertising. My site is not hugely busy – around 15,000 sessions per month which equates to around 75,000 page impressions (yes, I have quite a high visitor to page impressions ratio), however, I don’t make this information public, so other than looking at something like Alexa, they wouldn’t necessary know how busy my site is.

Ideally of course, I’d like to charge a monthly fee – I’m sure if they get no referrals they’ll stop paying, but I’d rather do it on a month-by-month basis than a one off.

Any ideas on what a reasonable charge would be?

Thanks.

[Michael Anthony]

I would establish what they sell and how much they make per sale, then try and do a deal where you charged them a small monthly fee but also received a payout per lead/sale that your site generated.

[ken_b]

Here's a consideration about placing a link in an article, what happens if they stop paying? Do you take the article down? Will it still make sense if you just remove the link?

Maybe put the link in a related links box adjacent to the article.

As for what to charge, do you have any other paid ads to get an idea from?

High traffic is not the only measure of value, a low traffic page can still be pretty valueable.

[markwelch]

One extra warning, since you indicated that the advertiser is a "commercial financial site" -- do some research to determine if there are government regulations regarding this type of relationship.

For example, if your web site provides general retirement planning advice, and a mutual fund wants to pay you to suggest their fund in an article, this is probably NOT allowed unless you disclose the payment, and this might even trigger state and federal registration requirements aimed at preventing consumer fraud against investors.

[eljefe3]

You could also charge them on a pay per click basis based on what the going rate for the general keywords that people find you site using. Use a tracking script that records the outbound clicks from your site to theirs.

[dickbaker]

I have a site that includes about a thousand pages of content devoted to individual brands and models of widgets.

One custom widget maker approached me about advertising on my site. They wanted to have four pages on the site, one for each of the customized widgets they produce.

At the end of the product description is a link to the widget order page on their site.

We did a trial run for one month to see how many clicks they got off those four pages. They then agreed to pay me $900 for a full year, which works out to about thirteen cents per click.

Hope the above is of some help.