We have a unique web-site which has about 40,000 subscribers representing a demographic cross section of the population (from unemployed all the way up to a fortune 1000 CEO), where the users generate a lot of – for them – relevant content.
All subscribers have children under the age of 16 – as a matter of a fact they have a total of about 73,000 children in that age group.
On average, each of the subscribers visit the site once a week, viewing 5 pages, generating a total of 200,000 page views per week – or on average 866,000 + pages per month.
The number of subscribers – and children – grows by about 10 % per month.
94% of subscribers are to be found in UK, with the balance in Ireland.
We have a LOT of demographic information about all subscribers and their children, and do active data mining on the web-site, showing what interest each individual subscriber and we know that the “average expected subscription life span” for each subscriber is 7 years!
After having asked our users and gotten their approval, we are now considering to introducing advertisement on the site as a combination of banner ads (1,512,000 adverts per year) and text based ads similar to Google AdWords (2,280,000 adverts per year), based on the existing subscriber base and their usage patterns.
We have some reservations – on moral and ethical grounds – on which companies and products we are willing to advertise for.
Now to the questions:
Who should we go to for serving advertisements?
We have decided that we will only base our advertisement system on CPM advertisements, and with that in mind, how much revenue could we expect to achieve as a CPM price for respectively the banner ads and the text based ads?
If you have any further questions I will do my best to answer them, thug I am not at liberty to divulge the site, as we are working on some serious expansion plans.
It's against our TOS to drop URLs so even if you did mention the site we'd snip that. So it's good that you didn't.
If you have compelling reasons for wanting really tight control over what ads appear on the site, plan to negotiate direct relationships with approved advertisers and serve your own ads, or maybe post carefully chosen affiliate banners, rather than relying on the rotations of an ad network.
You'll have a smaller pool of ads that way but you'll avoid a lot of "editorial frustrations".
Sites that have a lot of repeat traffic tend to get fewer ad clicks. Combine that with a smaller ad pool and your best bet will probably be ads that pay CPM rather than CPC.
Have you considered any form of email marketing? With such a well-documented membership, you'd be able to do unusually good targeting.
All we do not want is “the normal unwanted” ads for adult content, “strongly immoral” material and services, drugs, weapons, political parties etc., other than that, we have no issues!
We are looking for one or two advertisement networks, as we do not want ads to be exposed to a subscriber to be to often, partly because ads then become to irritating, has hardly any effect and that we do have sponsors who pay a premium to be guaranteed a certain number of exposures and who are also “preferred 3’d party suppliers”!
My situation regarding to advertisements right now is I will have to find out if it is worth the hassle for us and if it is financially advantageously compared with the – hopefully very limited – irritation factor that they are to the subscribers.
In spite of us being the only site who offer our service, and that our subscribers sign up for it because they actually NEED it, we do not want to alienate the users more than absolutely necessary!
However, we are running a business – something that our subscribers are aware of – and need to make money. Not only to become fat but also to keep improving the service and its offerings to our subscribers.
So what I need to get an over all picture of is approximately how much could we calculate to achieve per CPM for respectively banner ads and text based ads like e.g. Google AdSence?
All though we do have a validated e-mail address for all our subscribers, we do at the moment do not send out any news letter, but perhaps that was an idea! Do any one have an idea about how much such a “monstrosity” could generate?
you sound like you're in the position at the moment of being a bit excited about all this extra money you're going to be making. but you might find it's a lot of work to get the kind of ads you want. you'll have to set them up with the individual companies. if you want less work and use things like Adsense, then you'll have to give up some of that quality and control.
My experiences with ad networks goes back to late 90’s (I am one of “the old guards” on the Internet with my first web-site out there back in January 1998), and they were not the best, with a lot of #*$! and drug (of the illegal kind), and those I do not want.
However, I expect that these kinds of adverts are more or less gone from the “serious” ad networks now days.
So, with the initial page exposures and user information, what kind of CPM revenue could we REALISITCALLY expect to achieve if we open up for advertisement on our web-site?
Most ad networks these days have filters for everything you mentioned, plus more (like ads that auto expand, play music, etc.)
To see if it is worth it for you, you could use a $2 CPM for ad networks and maybe up to $10 CPM for direct ad sales depening on your website (many major and niche websites charge much higher rates than that)...
Using your 866k page views/month x $2 CPM (cost for 1000 page impressions) you are looking at ~$1700 in revnue a month. With a high CPM for direct advertisers you could see up to ~$8500/month.
These estimates use your total page views, I'm wondering why your yearly estimates for adverts are only around 1.5m and 2.2m? Are you not putting ads on all the pages?
Your demographic is well defined. Look at competitor websites to find big brand names that are advertising.
Put together a media kit and engage a salesperson to sell your impressions to them.
