Free service moving to fee/ad based

Could really use some advice

[sharbel]

Hello everyone,

I am a web-application developer. I develop solutions for companies, usually by contract. I, on my spare time, have developed a site which is a service for teams of a popular online game. The service has not been advertised that much (just on a message board or two). It gets about 1000 unique visits a day (about 10,000 page views). This is not counting any forums.

I have decided to begin charging for the service I offer, which will involve each team paying about $50 a year for the service, which is a tad less than another service out there that has about 6,000 teams using the service (not all paying). For the teams that can't or do not want to pay, I still want them to be able to use the service, just with some ads to offset my development/bandwidth costs.

My question is this, I've been reading around here and see that banners don't seem to be worth it. Don't get me wrong, I am not expecting to make 10k a month off the site with its present traffic, I was just wondering what is realistic expectations?

Should I approach gaming sites to advertise with me? or should I just join a service to provide me with ads? Or is affliate programs the way to go? I am not necessarily looking for the easiest thing to implement. As I said, I am a programmer, not affraid of a little work to increase my profits.

Thanks for any advice guys/gals, I am new to the boards and man I am impressed with all the info here... some great reading here!

Sharbel

[Bradley]

If you are going to charge for your service, I would contact the teams that are using your service and explain the reasoning whey you are going to go to a fee-based service. I would then survey them to see how much they would be willing to pay.... It would be good to know if everyone would be willing to pay the $50, or if nobody would pay at all.......While that's a dramatic example, it would be good to know what to expect. Results of your survey might alter your plan of action. Ask the simple question:

"If we had to charge for our service, how much would you be willing to spend, per year, to use our service?"

[ggrot]

As for banners, you would be looking at a maximum of maybe $10/day from that traffic. Getting more than $1 CPM is tough, and its pretty hard to get even that. I have a fastclick (one of the bigger advertising agencies) account, and am earning an effective $0.40 CPM

[sharbel]

Thanks for the replies so far.

Yes, I have already made the existing members aware of me going to a non-mandatory fee service. The service I provide *should* be paid for in some fashion. I didnt just put up some static HTML pages.. the site is a custom web-application.. easily 1500 hours of programming (done in C# (ASP.NET)). People have responded saying they have no problems paying, others say they will just live with banners.

Do many people approach companies directly for advertising? I was thinking to contact companies that deal in online gaming to advertise on my site. What do you guys think about doing that in conjunction with an ad agency and affiliate ads?

[Cristal]

I would think you would get a great response by approaching businesses directly. Of course this would depend on how large the company is and whether you are able to reach a person who has any sort of say on how things get done, as opposed to a "policy". Just my 2 cents.

I have been contacting businesses directly to advertise on my site and the response has been good. They actually seem a little more excited, and I am noticing them sending thier "friends" over. FYI I have been using a free application for serving ads available at www.phpadsnew.com

[sharbel]

Thanks for the information! I think I am going to give it a shot, getting ads myself. Thanks for the link to the management software.

Does anyone have any tips as to what the 'going' rate for banners on a gaming site? If someone is selling ads for $35CPM thats for each 1000 impressions right? Do most companies make you buy 10,000 impressions as a minimum? Or is it totally up to the person buying?

Thanks for the help so far!