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At the moment we have around 2-3 million unique per month and revenue is about $50-$55K per month. Pretty tight margins as content/staff costs are high and very competitive area, also limitation on how we can increase traffic outside of organic since hard to make a ROI on CPC.
I was thinking on starting to sell some of our advertising direct. Our main advertising broker sells quite a lot of targeted campaigns on the site, making up about 1/3 of our income. They take 50%.
The rest is mostly from Adsense and another contextual advertising company.
We have an adserver and can geo target etc.
Has anyone gone down this route before?
Will large companies even entertain direct insertion orders at this scale? Our advertisers tend to be movie studios, gaming companies, some tech companies, finance, much larger online newspapers. Pretty broad scope, reflecting the site's coverage.
Should we wait until our traffic is much higher?
Are there pitfalls I should think about?
Would it be worth hiring someone to do this?
Thanks
James
[edited by: eljefe3 at 4:24 am (utc) on July 12, 2007]
Your best bet for the amount of traffic you have is to try and sell on a tenancy basis, rather than CPM. Try to find companies that would benefit from brand association with your site. There are still plenty of companies out there that think in offline terms and if you can show them a good audience, they'll pay what is effectively over the odds to advertise on your site.
You do need a dedicated person to go out and get the business and, to be honest, I am not sure you could make enough money on a CPM basis to cover the cost of a decent sales person. If, however, your audience is of the ABC1 variety, for example, or particularly geared towards a certain market (gamers, for example), you may well get away with charging a higher rate.
