Forum Moderators: skibum
I have a website that gets a rather immense number of pageviews per day versus the number of uniques into the site. for every 5000 uniques I receive I can expect 250k+ page impressions. I have yet to formally monetize this website (its been a hobby rather than a method of income). I have a hunch that the best monetization strategy for this site would be to deploy CPM based campaigns (ie: valueclick, burst) throughout the site rather than go for a cpc model (adsense, ypn) simply due to the sheer volume of page impressions I can deliver.
What are your thoughts on this. The traffic quality is not amazingly high (the site caters to young adults) but users end up staying on the website for very long periods of time. The growth is also exponential and quite explosive.
I'll end up testing quite a bit but I wanted to get a little feedback as to the initial direction to take. I've read horror stories of the CPM networks delivering 10 cents per thousand impressions... while others give their highest recommendation. Forgive my inexperience as this is the first site of mine to really take off... its a mixture of excitement and "uh oh, what have I gotten myself into and how can I stop bleeding money on this bandwidth bill..."
You didn't explain what kind of site it is; high pageview counts are often associated with free-email hosting, discussion forums, game-tips-and-cheats sites, and picture and video collections.
With that kind of traffic pattern, it's quite likely that your clickthrough rate for any advertising is going to be very, very low.
My suggestion for sites exploring advertising is usually to start by signing up for Google AdSense and/or Yahoo Publisher Network. You'd probably want to rotate ad units from different sources, so that you might show an AdSense ad for the 1st pageview, YPN for the 2nd, ValueClick for the 3rd, etc.
You should NOT have high expectations. For most sites with high pageview-per-visitor counts, the very best you could hope for is about $1 CPM ($1 per 1,000 adviews), and more typical net earnings are likely to be something like $0.10 to $0.20 CPM.
Of course, the specicic topic of your site, and the content and audience at your site, will be an important factor. If your visitors are all reading reviews to decide which computer to buy or which web hosting service to use, you might draw stronger revenue; if the site's content isn't related in any way to a potential purchase, things could look worse.
