Affiliate earnings

[nomis5]

Straight to the point. I earn a good living from Adsense and a few other income sources on two main sites plus a few less-performing sites. There's a space at the top of those pages where I have very recently placed banner ads from an affiltae scheme. Around 500,000 page impressions on a bad month, more for the rest of the time.

Those banner ads are earning me a couple of pounds a day from Value Click but are costing me a second or two in page download time. The cost of a beer a day is small but if it's free then I'll have it. But the page download time increase is the killer.

Do those earnings sound correct for your average afiliate scheme? It's a CPM one, but clearly I'm also getting clicks and the clicks alone don't come anyway approaching the return I get from Adsense. Am I doing anything wrong? Is the affiliate scheme buisness more complicated than I thought? Any comments would be appreciated.

[jimbeetle]

It's a CPM one

If you're being paid strictly CPM then it's more an advertising program than affiliate scheme. Banner CPM rates vary, but I'd say about a buck per thousand would be okay, whatever that comes out to in pence or pounds.

[eljefe3]

Depending on the niche, you could be getting a good return with a text link to an affiliate program, with no extra loading time.

[nomis5]

Text links yes. I do that already and they earn much more than the banner link. I'm thinking that the banner type is a near no-earner at the moment but I'm not yet convinced that there isn't more to it than I'm seeing at first. I'll plod on and devote some more time to it before I drop it altogether.

[nomis5]

An update. It's now been a week or so after entering the banner ad affiliate markey and the earnings, originally so depressing, have multiplied threefold. Still not impressive, but far better than originally. Value click is the one I used.

I have done nothing other than exclude one rather clever company who placed an add which looked like my site's navigation bar.

I'll keep this page updated on progress. For another of my sites I have applied to Tribal Fusion, let's see how that goes.

[davewray]

Why don't you rotate a banner ad, and a text link in that same spot and see which performs better over time? Keep the better performer, obviously.