Company wants to advertise on my website

How to respond?

[rubenski]

Hi folks,

How do you properly respond to a company that wants to advertise on a specific article on my website?

Should I include statistics about the article? The article yields about 75-80 dollar montly in Adsense revenue. The page receives about 80 pageviews per day.

What info should I include? What is normal? It's the first time :) Thanks a bunch for responding.

[hunderdown]

I'd tell them the monthly pageviews, and charge them at least double what you are making from AdSense. Don't tell them what you are making from AdSense, but if they question your charge, tell them that with what you make from AdSense it's not worth it to you to charge less--and they will be getting exclusive placement on the page.

Or if they want, they could be on the page WITH AdSense, in which case you could charge less....

[Celicaphile]

wow, $80/mo from that one article off of 80 hits a day? They must have a good reason & know that they stand to make a great deal for placement on a single article. Perhaps you could find a competitor who has an affiliate program and determine what you could make & offer that amount...

[frup]

It may not be traffic they are trying to buy. ;-)

[The Innovator]

If not traffic what else?

[frup]

They could want exposure. Maybe that specific article is read by a certain class of people and they want those people to see the ad for some reason, even if they aren't clicking on it.

They could also be wildly overestimating the traffic that page gets, which would go against what I am saying.

Or it could be some weird SEO thing.

[rubenski]

My guess is they are indeed overestimating the amount of traffic for that page. It's a page about ADSL2, a type of broadband connection and it ranks first in Google for "ADSL2". I think I will just do the Adsense revenue * 175%. It seems fair to me. The "problem" is that Adsense is working so well that it's hardly worth the trouble of dealing with regular advertisers anymore.

[rubenski]

Thanks everyone. Mail is sent. I doubled the Adsense amount and offered them the alternative Hunderdown suggested (their banner WITH Adsense) for less.

This is a very clear example of how Adsense is driving up prices for online advertising.