Need advice on monetization

newcomer need help

[linares]

Hello,
I run an informational website that is geared to antique collectors. It is about six years old and currently averages about 80,000 visitors per month (50,000 uniques) and about 750,000 page views per month. I have never had any type of advertising on the site, and have no experience with any of the programs out there. To say I have no knowledge about how it all works would be an understatement.
That said, given the numbers, is there any way to figure a ballpark estimate on what sort of income various ad programs could generate.

Thanks for any advice,
Lin

[Musicarl]

Lin-

You won't know until you try. It sounds like this site is important to you, and you don't want to plaster it with ugly ads. Give AdSense a try and see how that works for you. From there, affiliate programs might also work, but you have such a niche that I don't think other ad networks would do well. But, you don't know until you try.

[Skeptic]

Diversify, try different companies and different ad types. Each web site is different and may get different results.

[eljefe3]

Test, test and test some more.

[ergophobe]

Funny you should mention this. I have a friend with a photography site with similar stats (actually over a million page views per month) and he is really reticient to put any sort of advertising on it. I'm trying to encourage him to try a few things and there may be similar options for you.

He has a page about what he carries in his camera kit - cameras, lenses, etc. I feel like he would actually be improving the user experience if he linked up those items to a photo site like B&H. Of course, it does no harm to make that link an affiliate link.

I'm also trying to get him to try AdSense on a small subset of pages and put the ads way down at the bottom. In other words, where they would be *least* likely to get noticed, but also least likely to interfere with the user experience.

Try those two really modest experiments and see what happens. Of course, these ads are practically hidden, so income would be low, but it would be a way to ease into it and you could see whether or not you're losing visitors. If not, you could try a bit more obvious placement for a few months and watch the stats again.

Given my friend's attitude and yours to the site, I think the danger of plastering ads all over the site is low, so use your own judgement. When ads get obtrusive, just back it down a notch.

I use a similar strategy - "terrible" ad placement in that I have very unobtrusive banners and AdSense way at the bottom of a subset of pages, and nothing aside from a banner on the 10 most popular pages. I really only want them there for the person who is just not finding what they want on my site and looking everywhere for something interesting to click on. But on 250,000 page views, it's around $500-1000 I think (I'd have to look - I honestly don't pay that much attention). It was 3x that when the ads were more obtrusive, but I didn't like it (meanwhile, I have a low-traffic site that is plastered with ads and on 1/10 the traffic, it earns about the same).

[sem4u]

I would try AdSense, Ebay's affiliate program and any antique goods affiliate programs that you can find.

[linares]

Thank you all (Musicarl, Skeptic, eljefe3, ergophobe & sem4u) for the helpful advice. I probably will experiment with a some of your suggestions. I take it from what was not said, that there is actually no way to approximate a website's potential?
Thanks again,
Lin

[edited by: encyclo at 11:40 pm (utc) on Feb. 12, 2008]