Accepting ads - payment before or after placement?

[shallow]

When you accept an individual ad, do you require payment before or after the ad is placed? Thank you,.

[vordmeister]

I will include the ad and check the advertiser is happy with placement before payment. But I do require instant payment in advance.

So far all advertisers have sent payment instantly once they are happy with their ad. I'd not offer 30 day payment terms on advertising - that would be open to abuse.

[shallow]

Thank you. Now I just have to figure out how much to charge. :O

[vordmeister]

Drives me mad that advertisers don't just offer what it's worth to them. If you push them for an offer they come up with a low ball offer.

My rates (for sites between 1000 and 5000 page views a day, PR3 or 4 homepages, reasonably targeted to the advertiser) are £30/month for a 125*125 prominent on the home page, and £10 per month for the same on any other page. Mine pass pagerank as I've not yet figured out the technology to do otherwise, and the advertisers seem to prefer it.

[shallow]

Thank you vordmeister for sharing that information.

I've been charging $60 annually to run a small text link ad on an inner page (PR 3). Pricing it was only a wild guess.

A few advertisers have written back and, surely inadvertently, mentioned a price higher than I quoted. One fairly large site offered more money for a six month renewal for an ad running on the home page (PR5) than what they paid for the ad the entire previous year (new company contact).

So I think I may be charging too little. However, trying to find information on what to ask is difficult. Of course, I know there are many factors.

[vordmeister]

I found it tricky to find pricing info for similar sites on the internet as well. So I could be completely wrong.

But it does sound like you have good evidence that your prices are far too low.

One useful technique is to ask a little higher that you would ever expect to get. If the advertiser disagrees tell them you'll get back to them within a week as there's someone else who might take the spot for that price. In my case this was the truth.

I'd love to know what you end up with. But I realise it is beyond the rules of this esteemed forum to suggest you send a message. So I won't.

[shallow]

One of the things I was advised is to see how much I make with AdSense annually for a page. I don't track all pages but can get a general idea from similar pages. Thanks again.

[vordmeister]

I decided that was rubbish. Especially for sites that don't really suit adsense. I make a lot more from direct advertising on a single page than adsense on the whole site on those. They were only ever hobby sites not intended to make money.

There are a couple of sites I don't allow direct advertising on.

[httpwebwitch]

Or you could go for an auction system... ? Say you have several slots on your page, and on the first of each month the highest bidder gets the spot for the following month. I wonder how that would play out. What a half-baked idea. Does anyone actually do that?

@vordmeister, thank you for reading the TOS, and casually suggesting that someone NOT send you a private message. That was cheeky :)

Personally I would like to know what factors are involved in pricing an ad placement. Monthly unique visitors, for sure. Content Targeting, certainly. Passing along PageRank, yeah - even though Google hates that. Is it possible to reduce all that to an equation?