Are your Advertising Rates shooing away customers?

What were you smoking when you set them?

[martinibuster]

Seriously, I believe that some folks out there don't actually want any advertisers. And judging by the banner free pages on them, this has got to be true.

How else to explain a city specific web site whose web advertising rates (200x200 px banner) start at $300/month and go up to over $400/month? This is prevelant throughout many niche industries, and it smacks of a poor business practice.

There is a recession/depression going on, which means that prices of goods and services go down. But not for these banner-free folks.

Certainly some internet properties can command these prices and more.

But what about the ad-less small fry who isn't selling any ads? Do you think that they ever considered their ad rates too high and that's why they aren't selling? Are they dreaming, smoking or both?

[edited by: martinibuster at 11:08 pm (utc) on Jan. 6, 2003]

[Quinn]

I don't know if this decribes the situation you're seeing, but I know of several niche webmasters who now command rates equal to or exceeding that for text links.

If you look at their ad info, they're still pitching banner ads, and the probably have no idea why people are paying so much for those text links. ;)

[rcjordan]

I know what you're talking about, MB. You can often look around the site and tell that the developer had a "build-it-and-they-will-flock-here-to-advertise" mentality. OTOH, I know of some sites that command $1k/m flat-rate for a cheesy, 120x140, adwords-like text box ad and have had the clients booked for well over a year.

[europeforvisitors]

It may be that the sites don't consider it worthwhile to accept ads at low rates, especially if the ads are completely unrelated to the site's content or send a negative message to the user.

On my own site, I haven't been running ads until recently because I affiliate sales generate higher RPM than ads. I'm now trying banners through Tribal Fusion, not to earn run-of-network CPMs (which are lousy) but to see if there'll be a market for targeted advertising at more reasonable CPMs as we approach the spring travel-planning season. I did a lot of thinking before deciding to experiment with banners, because I don't want to detract from the credibility of my site or the impact of my affiliate links with a bunch of off-topic ads. And I still refuse to run popups, popunders, or ads for things like Internet casinos.