Best way to Monetize 2-3 Million hits monthly

Got all this anonymous traffic, best way to get paid.

[Marble68]

Hi all. I'm researching ways to monetize web traffic. When looking around, I see a great deal of different CPM & CPC companies out there.

The site I'm researching for get's about 2-3 million impressions a month. Because of the high traffic, the content of the ads is VERY important. No adult ads or anything like that are acceptable.

We currently don't gather much demographics on anyone, so the targeting ability is limited.

Another concern is the companie's ability to sell the ad space. Ad size hasn't been determined, it going to depend on various factors. Would like to keep in house ads to a minimum.

Can anyone recommend a great place to start? Currently, I'm examining DoubleClick pretty heavily, but I see a lot of privacy concerns on usenet.

If you've got this kind of traffic, how did you achieve the best results?

TIA for any suggestions or recommendations.

Chris

[JamesR]

I would work in affiliate programs into the content of the site. You could also contact sites that want the same kind of users your site attracts and offer to sell them the traffic under Overture's rates.

The probably with banners is that everyone ignores them. I just recently tried a few banners, hoping to bring a related demographic to a new site. The click throughs were pathetic. People have a laser like focus when coming to most sites and if you don't give them very similar content/links, they will zone it out (kind of like I do at CNN and MSNBC when you read the news stories...who notices the ads?)

[Marble68]

Does anyone here have any experience dealing with 24/7?

What kind of revenue did they generate for you?

Chris

[fathom]

>>The site I'm researching for get's about 2-3 million impressions a month. Because of the high traffic, the content of the ads is VERY important.<<

>>We currently don't gather much demographics on anyone, so the targeting ability is limited.<<

Demographics are extremely important. The right ads for the right markets is very valuable to both vendor (ad space) and visitor interest. 2 - 3 million impressions is "huge" to a niche market (specialty site) and relatively small to a general market (e.g. news site)

>>Does anyone here have any experience dealing with 24/7?
What kind of revenue did they generate for you?<<

Totally dependent on price-points (both ads space and items for purchasing) and how targeted incoming visitors are is the different between offering added value and and a lemon. Targeting the wrong vendors for the wrong market means limited ROI and a poor image brand for your site.

Total number of pageview per visitor / total number of web pages / traffic per individual page are all extremely important concerns.

In addition, if inbound traffic has high referral rate from search engines outbound linkage may reduce overall traffic performance.

Check your sticky.

[firstmark]

I wouldn't recommend 24/7 they now have an adserving fee of 5 cents cpm and heavily push popups.
Also when they shut down their contentzone division for small publishers they gave no email notice or anything. I just noticed banners were serving up broken and had to remove their code. Also if you hadn't reached minimums for payouts you just lost that sum of money.

That did not inspire my confidence in them after I receicved an offer from some search feed thing
they were trying to push their affiliates to before they closed contentzone down with no notice.

[tmax]

You really might want to consider cobranded content with revenue commissions. I'm not sure of the content of your site, but say you have business people coming there, you might want to consider cobranding with a financial portal who, not only will supply you with content, but provide referral compensation for visitors who end up purchasing brokerage or other services with them. Casino sites are said to be very successful doing this. I'll refrain from shamelessly plugging our site, but I'll mention, we can provide you with a cobranded classifieds content with excellent 33%-50% referral compensation everytime someone lists a paid listing in your cobranded classifieds (free to set-up). If you're interested email me and I'll give you the details.

Good luck with your venture.

tmax

[Lisa]

DoubleClick requires 1M a month. So sounds like you qualify for them. I have used 24/7 but earned like $50 in two years. I also had a friend that worked there but he has left. So I am not certain how solid that company is.

I would think that offering similar products that you do not produce. Partnering with a similar company. I find this very attractive and I generate good side income on that.

[Marble68]

Wow, thanks for the info.

I guess 24/7 is in the dumps. I had no idea.

Perhaps DoubleClick would be the way to go.

What's amazing to me is when you look out there you see people charging anywhere from $15 to $30 CPM. But from what I'm hearing here, you only get paid on average 5 cents CPM.

What a rip off!

I don't know if we want to start our own in house ad sales. I've seen a few places where advertisers can go in and buy traffic. How in the world does one manage all of this? Some of the third party solutions?

Thanks again for the feedback.

Chris

[dogboy]

first thing to do is look at your existing stats. Whoever had that site before you had to keep track somehow.... that will help you come up with a 'profile' of the typical surfer that comes to your site... then cater to that person's immediate and secondary needs... you have enough traffic to warrant investing in some key co/full branded affiliate programs... and get much better deals than the normal site owner.

depending on the type of site, you might also want to consider rotating (and monitoring) different style templates to see which converts the best...

hard to say other than that without knowing the site, but you better get a good handle on your bandwidth or you can multiply your mistakes 2M-fold:)

[musicales]

I would recommend Burst as an ad network. I tried doubleclick for a while but they paid worse. My site gets 3 million too. Burst has been the best paying - I think it works out about $0.2 cpm, but they have been more sniffy recently about taking on new sites. I also had some reasonable revenue from targeted affiliate links. This works best if you can text link within the content to a precise product like a book or whatever. On my site this brings in another $150 a month which is not to be sniffed at.

[Marble68]

I suppose I should I post my URL.

We're an international chain of theaters, but [it's] is almost exclusively for the domestic market.

We get tons of traffic, and we don't sell tickets for all our theaters yet.

I just feel that a site with our profile and medium should be able to generate some revenue of significance.

Thanks for all the great advice,

Chris

<no urls, please -rcj>

(edited by: rcjordan at 4:22 pm (utc) on May 30, 2002)

[Dumpy]

I have had excellent luck with Fastclick. I had a real problem setting up, because I have hundreds of sites and the customer service people invented a solution for me which allowed me to setup instantly. Their checks come on time every month, and keep increasing dramaticly. They do everything...I just cash the checks. I have had ZERO problems.

I have found the bandwidth to income ratio extremely profitable. They serve the banners, so I only serve text.

I have had extreme problems with the "Elete" advertising companies over the last five or so years. It is damn pleasant to sit back and work on site improvement and empire, and not have to battle for a buck.