Work required for ad sales for a popular site

Are there agencies to handle this?

[Retireaway]

OK, here is the question. A partner and I are working on a site that we think has the potential to be easily a million unique users a month, and high demographic users as well. The site project by its nature will not have many pages. It is also a web service site, but we think selling web services for money is just too hard, so ads for traffic it is.

For a high volume site (yes we are optimistic, but we need to consider whether this can even be economically viable even if it does hit) how much work is it to sell ads? We are thinking of probably banners, skyscrapers, and at least one high pay more "obnoxius" type of ad like floating ads, but no popups.

We are shoestring startup and don't wish to ever hire employees. But I was reading the other day that for a high volume site, you need a sales staff just to sell ads, not even to mention the web implementation and billing and tracking issues. Is this really true? Especially if a site doesn't have alot of pages?

And also, I am wondering, are there firms that will manage the whole process for you (selling, tracking, billing, implementing) for a percentage, and if so, who are they, and how much do they charge?

Thanks for any feedback on this question.

[skibum]

I think you'd probably go to an ad network to sell if you don't want to do it yourself. Most agencies represent companies that want to buy. They'll look for support of 3rd party tracking - Atlas DMT, DoubleClick or some other ad server and look to negotiate the rate down as low as possible. Depending on the agency and the number of placements, expect you to work with them to maximize whatever the key metric is, sales leads, click-throughs, etc.. from the ad placements non the website. They may want to know demographics of site visitors as well.

[Retireaway]

That's interesting. Does anyone know what kind of cost would be involved in using such an ad network, especially for a newer site not affiliated with a large corporation? For example, if the site itself could charge 1.50 per 1000 impressions for a banner ad, how much less would the site expect if the sales were handled by an agency?
I wouldn't think a newer site would have much negotiating clout, even a high traffic site.

Also, could someone mention some specific ad networks that they can recommend?

[jomaxx]

There's this thing called "AdSense" that sounds promising.

[Retireaway]

Well, yes, but the site we are creating will just be a few static pages, with minimal text, so I was assuming banners and one floater type ad would have much more potential.