We've talked about doing away with AdSense in our messageboard and offering our own text based derivative (written by the advertiser). The main difference is that we would sell space for specific urls (we have over 100k) of them for say a $1 a month (the dollar figure isn't important or necessarilly fixed at this time).
Our site ranks pretty highly in our niche, so click or now click, the simple act of a url from our site to theirs in the context of regular content should prove valuable to an advertiser.
Is this type of url by url ad purchasing program likely to generate interest from advertisers? Especially, if the purchasing process is in real time and painless?
A critical reason most small sites go with google an YPN , methinks is because the expense, an the hassle of recruiting advertisers would probably be remarkable to say the least,
Are you thinking that your page viewers are also likely to be your advertisers?
Do you use google adwords or overture to advertise yourself or traditional media adverts or dependent on google yahoo msn SERPs,
I'll watch with fascination if I may
Advertisers often contact us after having read their traffic reports to find that we've sent them traffic or find that our pages rank above their own for certain keywords. We don't generally accept their offer because their budget is far less than what we make with google. And, we are quite sensitive to not overwhelming our visitors with ads or promotions.
I "think" if we promoted it properly and explained that the true benefit is us linking to them (increased search engine rank) and visible exposure versus an actual click, they'd be interested in paying a relatively small amount of money on a target url.
We have enough pages that we could "possibly" earn enough on volume.
We'd break even against our current strategy with google if 1% of our total forum pages were purchased for a $1 a piece for a month.
Our initial idea was to create a shopping cart of urls (of sorts) as they navigated through the forums. When ready, they could type in a paragraph and a link and make a bulk purchase.
At that point, they'd be the only ad shown on the entire page for the length of time they purchased the url for.
What I don't fully understand is how knowledgable advertisers are or whether an alternative tactic like this would be of use to them.
I think like a publisher. I need thoughts from advertisers.
Appreciate your help.
Quantum Goose was referring to your 'User Profile'... the site mention in your previous post will get removed, fyi.
You pose an interesting question. I do think that managing the sales process will be a significant pain. The pricing does sound reasonable, but with very small advertisers (which sounds like your target), you've got a unique set of issues: irregular budget issues, inexperienced negotiators (which is a bad thing - education significantly slows the sales process), inexperienced marketers (who largely cannot measure effectiveness - & attempt to renegotiate w/ you if they don't see an "overall bump" in sales) and - likely - significant turn-over.
Not so sure we are concerned about turnover. That could potentially work in our favor in some ways.
We have lots to consider prior to moving forward with something like this and beginning the coding process.
