Approached by Advertiser

wants to pay for links on home page

[microcars]

OK, so many of you are going:
"Yeah, so someone wants to pay you to put some links on your home page...what are you waiting for?"

well, there is NO Advertising on the main page of the site in question.
I never wanted the main page cluttered with Ads...like every other website.

The advertiser is a fairly large company, but they have not told me what "specifically" they want to put up, just text links that are automotive related.

This is a PR5 site and they are asking me "how much" per month.
I have no clue. I have no policy for this.

I know I would not put Google Ads up there, so why should I put their's?
I guess I have a price, everyone does, but I don't know how to determine it. I know how to price other things I do. But not this.

I make money with the websites I do, but the money does not come DIRECTLY from the website. It comes from the activities related to the websites.

I'd love to monetize the site, but not if it turns the thing into another banner-laden crapfest. I'm concerned that first they will want Text ads, then come back and want banner ads, then want Flash Ads....

does this make sense? am I just a whiner?

I have not been around here for awhile, so pointers to other threads that have already dealt with this would be appreciated.

[dickbaker]

When I had my primary site designed, I also didn't want it cluttered up with banner ads. People tell me the site looks very tasteful.

Well, as I continue to try to make more money from the site, I've become more open to running just one banner ad on a page, and that's only if the ad is tastefully done.

I guess the question is how much you want or need the money. In my case, this advertiser has banner ads on 26 of the 1600 or so pages on my site, and they pay $1200 a year, which I consider to be a fair price based on the number of clicks they get.

[microcars]

thanks for the insight

since I posted, they got back to me with an existing example and an offer.

I've decided to take it.

[Fortune Hunter]

This is an interesting thread, I sometimes find places for my clients to place ads for stuff that isn't through Google or Yahoo or one of the other large pay to click services, but rather directly with the owner of a site.

Each time this has been done it is a crap shoot in terms of what we should offer and for what. I would love to know if anyone has ever created a formula for pricing on something like this.

Fortune Hunter

[dickbaker]

Fortune Hunter, what I did with this client was give him a month for free on my site, and then record the number of clicks. We arrived at the $1200 per year based upon the number of clicks during the trial month, and went at a rate of 15 cents per click.

This client gets a 5% click-through rate on my site, so he's happy.

I have another advertiser on my site, but the ads don't look like ads. My site has over 1,000 pages of models of widgets from various manufacturers, with photos and product descriptions.

This advertiser makes customized widgets, so they're not very well known. They have four pages on my site with their four different custom widgets. At the bottom is a link for more information and for prices. They pay me $900 a year for those four pages.

They get a click-through rate of 13%, which is incredible. I wish I could find an advertiser for the rest of the 1600+ pages on my site that would get even a fraction of that CTR.