Web Advertising Revenues?

WoTG asks: "Every now and then I dream about starting a website and making it popular. Maybe for profit, maybe for fun. Web hosting costs are pretty easy to find and estimate. But I've always been stumped when it comes to guesstimating the revenue. How much can a moderately popular site expect to earn from advertising revenue? What companies that resell advertising space are -reliable- in their payments? How much more expensive are the larger ads (bigger than banners) worth? What websites are good for finding out more about this stuff?"

"For the sake of argument, let's say that it's a fairly targeted audience - maybe a forum for fans of a new TV series, or residents of a particular city. Let's also assume that it will have about a million hits a month. Lastly, let's assume we're only considering non-intrusive advertising, e.g. no pop-ups.

I've done little bit of research (but not much). Those spiffy google text ads are only available to sites with >20M hits a month. I've yet to stumble on good search terms on Google that will get me relevant results. Besides, more often than not, the insights from the Slashdot crowd are more useful than any other web 'resource'."

Contact the experts....

[stefanlasiewski]

What companies that resell advertising space are -reliable- in their payments?

This is the wrong place to ask. I highly recommend that you contact the experts [fuckedcompany.com]!

MarketBanker

[yerricde]

I highly recommend that you contact the experts [fuckedcompany.com]!

Especially because Pud runs both FC and MarketBanker [marketbanker.com], a service which may answer the original question.

Wrong question

[bpb213]

You are asking on slashdot. That implies you have read slashdot. Which in turn implies that you understand the opinions here. One thing most slashdotters hate is advertisements. I know I do. I run mozilla with the advertisement blocking stylesheet.

The right question to ask is not, "how do i make instant money off advertisers?", but "How do i make a good site advertisement free that supports itself?"

Now, go rephrase your question and ask slashdot again.

Re:Wrong question

[xutopia]

so how I ask you?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:good luck

[Telastyn]

Most sites I've seen be successful [read: profitable] actually sell a product. Tshirts, books or some such that relate to their site. People will pay for things they want more than they don't want the hassle of paying for. People don't want to click on ads [almost universally], people do want cool things.

Abandon hope all ye who enter in.

[Xunker]

Funny you should ask this question as just today I got a love-not from my main avertising broker saying they wern't going to pay me as much anymore.

Anyway, I'm reminded of something someone else once told me on this front: "making money on a web site is easy; doing it without pissing off your users is hard.", and that's the truth.

Web advertising is harder then ever, at least from a publishers perspective; the breadth of sites and users that are around now make it hard to command any great sum from advertisers; Even popup ads, the little darlings of the IAB, seldom pay more than $2 per thousand.

To make a living like, say, Slashdot you either need to be lucky enough to sign on with a large advertising death floatilla (tribalfusion, 247realmedia, etc) or hire an avertising broker/PR agent to sell your site to advertisiers; These sign-up-on-a-web-page dealies sound good and by and large are goods but don't scale well when it comes to paying $1500 a month in expenses not including money for you to live on. They are good for making a little on the side, not for financing a lifestyle.

You asked "How much can a moderately popular site expect to earn from advertising revenue?". The answer as I've seen it is, unless you have a very, very, very tight demographic, the answer is not much. If your site is already running, monitor it's ranking on Alexa [alexa.com] and see where you stand. Also, how do you define "moderately popular"? The answer varries widely depending on who you ask: A little while ago when I was lookign for advertisers, Advertising.com wouldn't even talk to me unless I had a 100,000 pageviews a day, and they consider that a "small site".

I guess what I'm trying to say is unless you have huge readership, you'll need some sort of specialized demographic (read: gimmick) to attract users and advertisers.

Also, remember that income is net: today being USA tax day and all you need to remember that you've gotta pay taxes on your monies, too, and that takes a big piece out.

If you're hell bent on doing this for a living you need to get lucky and cheat to win. Let's pick on Slashdot some more, shall we? Contrary to popular belief, it did not get popular based on those early Nude photos of Pater: it got popular largely based on riding the popularity wave of Linux and the Open Source zeitgeist. If you can find something similar, something that you can tune into, you'll stand a fighting chance.

Actually, I have no idea what I'm saying, I'm just rambling.

Re:Abandon hope all ye who enter in.

[stefanlasiewski]

If your site is already running, monitor it's ranking on Alexa [alexa.com] and see where you stad.

Wow, Alexa has come a long way since I last saw them.

I really question the quality of some of this infomation. Their measure of "Page views", "hits" only comes from people who install the Alexa Toolbar [alexa.com]. Spyware anyone?

Re:Abandon hope all ye who enter in.

[Xunker]

Never said it was quality. It's a basic barometer of where you stand in relation to other sites. It can help you gauge where you are (at least, wher you are in relation to the type of users who want a frigging bloated toolbar on their web browser).

At the very least, it can feed your ego.

Got Porn?

[Rick the Red]

Seriously, what about porn? Couldn't you start one of those sites that's basically all ads for porn sites, and use the profit from that to pay for your "real" site? You'ld think that they can't possibly make money, since there's so many of them, but on the other hand there's so damn many of them they must be making money or they'd all fold, right? (sorta like spam, in a way -- spam must make money, otherwise why would there be so many spammers?)

A good site

[ngtni]

A good site with lots of information is SitePoint [sitepoint.com], and more specifically, SitePoint Community Forums [sitepointforums.com].

That said, you will earn nothing from advertising. Nobody clicks on banner ads any more. In the future we will see many sites opting for the "micropayments for content" model.

Say it with me...

[Fastball]

"Estimate."

Or, say this...

"Guess."

There is no such word as guesstimate. A guess can be informed or uninformed; an estimate, informed. Here endeth the lesson.

Re:Say it with me...

[aoteoroa]

A couple years ago I would have agreed with you but all languages evolve.

guesstimate [reference.com]
n : an estimate that combines reasoning with guessing [syn: guestimate]
v : estimate based on a calculation

I tried it too...

[216pi]

... with a German geek-toys site à la thinkgeek [thinkgeek.com]. Since I hadn't the money to build up the logistic part around it, I tried it as a reseller. I found a good (German) affilate program (zanox [zanox.de]), that lets me choose products out of the participant's catalogues and get a revenue of 5% of every sold item. Additionally, every participant delivers a couple of banners in every needed format.

I mix the affilate program with amazon stuff, using their reseller program and make the products the content of the site.

Using movabletype [movabletype.org] and keeping in mind some main ideas of google in mind (search terms in filename and in the header, etc.) I finaly made my site to appear on top in google using some interesting keywords (dialer blocker (a tool to stop troyan horses dialing expensive numbers) [google.de], div x [google.de] or mx 700 [google.de]).

Additionally, I show banner ads. I show both, valueclick [valueclick.com] banners from external sponsors and 'internal' ones (sending the users to products or shops of the affiliate program or even sending them to the bestsellers of my site).

The content based ads are making around 3/4 of the money, the rest is devided in 4/5 of the affiliate banners and 1/5 (only a couple of Euros per month) through valueclick.

All in all, I have around 1500 visitors per month generating around 140.000 hits. It pays the traffic, but not my work (I've to post at least one new product a day).

The most important thing is that I have two other software products (ImagePuzzler [imagepuzzler.com] and ImageDupe [imagedupe.com]) I can advertise for on my site. Since ImageDupe's website is an often linked site and ImageDupe links back to futuregeek.de [futuregeek.de] I got a little 'google-bonus' from it.

All ads and clicks (even the valueclick's) are tracked using phpAdsNew [phpadsnew.com] and 99% of my visitors come from google, the rest is yahoo, lycos and a german meta search engine. Since I don't trust webalizer (especially the search engine identifier), I wrote my own script, that keeps an eye on the referers.

Next to nothing.

[Spudley]

If you're running it as a hobby, don't expect to earn anything serious. Trust me, I know. :-(

Sure, you can set up advertising, banners, pop-ups, merchandise, blah-di-blah-di-blah, but unless you're prepared to put in a lot of time, you simply won't get much out of it.

In order to make a significant amount from web advertising, you will need to keep a careful eye on which ads are earning and which aren't. You'll need to constantly add new ads, and purge the ones that aren't working. You'll need to keep in touch with the latest trends - what are people clicking on, and why, and change your adverts to follow the trends.

Put simply, if it's a hobby, you're not likely to have time to put in the effort required to make money from it.

Putting up a simple banner ad might get you a small amount of income - it depends on just how popular your site actually is ("moderately popular" is not a well defined amount), and also whether you're willing to sell your soul and advertise gambing sites and dodgy credit cards (these two categories will earn you about ten times anything else, but I still refuse to advertise them).

The other idea that might work for you (depending on what your site actually has on it) is merchandising. If your site is suitable for merchandising, may I humbly recommend you visit CafePress [cafepress.com], and start selling mugs and t-shirts with your logo. I have actually managed to make a bit of money from this, where advertising failed dismally. (also not much, but again I'm not putting in any real time to actively market them)

Sell Your Own

[JLester]

The site listed in my profile generates 5-8 million total pageviews each month and is entirely supported by advertising. We have a slightly unique take on things though. For one, we charge a flat rate per month, not based on CPM (the supposed industry standard which never made sense to me). We have two plans, Standard and Premium. Standard advertisers get about 5,000 impressions per day depending on traffic and # of active advertisers. Premiums get about double that and are shown at a higher priority.

Text Ads

[waldoj]

I've written a PHP/MySQL-based text advertising system that I'm testing out on one of my sites, a Dave Matthews Band fan site [nancies.org]. It's a wicked-simple PayPal-based system that has held up nicely for millions of page views over the last couple of months. If you want to sell your own ads self-serve style, and you think that your site's users will find that to be a useful service, you should consider such a system. Best of all, the ads are non-intrusive, both in terms of download time and visual clutter. If y

Finally

[the9thbit]

I would have to say I'm glad to see a worth while question... Its been a while.

I've tried google for hours on this and never found anything worth while. I do like the www.cafepress.com that with a inexpensive member service like here on slashdot, and a paypal "please donate a few bucks" sound like the way to run a non-profit site these days.

Crap... that means I don't have an excuse not to make that site thats been sitting in the back of my head.

Very low profit.

[gmiller123456]

I used to have advertising on my chess web site which received about 1.5M pageviews per month when I finally took them off.

I'm bound by a NDA to not disclose the prices involved. But I can tell you that unless you can get users to click the banners, you won't make any money at all. And even then, it has to be different people clicking on the banners every time (same IP in 24hrs doesn't count). Additionally, you're not allowed to tell people to click on them in any way shape or form. And if that isn't e

Try AdWords (Google service)

[knobboy]

I have a small website (aspectscripting.com) that caters to users of Procomm Plus (terminal emulation software that I used to test and still use every day) and its ASPECT scripting language. I bought some ads through google.com, that combined with the regular Google cataloging of my site, seems to have done a good job of drawing users to my site (Google appears much higher as a referrer than other search engines).

https://adwords.google.ca/select/ is the Canadian version of the .com site I used to create a

In-house marketing

[hafree]

The downside of relying on advertising revenue to support the operating costs is that you'll never come out ahead if you don't handle it yourself. As the proprietor of an internet radio station, we basically give away 60-80Mbits of bandwidth at any given moment, which isn't really the best business model. Just about every advertising network you can participate in has a "we don't have to pay you" clause in their terms of service that allows them to cancel your contract at any time for any reason without w

turn up the 'popularity' in here...

[Hubert_Shrump]

Every now and then I dream about starting a website and making it popular...

Feh, if it gets too popular you'll just have to make it less popular again.

Revenue from other places

[crazyj]

Don't just plan on web advertising revenue. Think of other creative ways to make some dough. We [macslash.org] have been pretty successful with the Amazon Affiliate program. We even added some stuff to Slashcode that allows the authors to very easily link to Amazon products in the stories. Some of the readers don't like it, but you could denote those links with an icon or something. Most of our readers are tolerant and understand that we need to make some money. Most months our Amazon income beats or banner ad income.

Another thing that worked well for us was a biweekly or monthly book/product list that we worked into the left column of the site. Also, work directly with related companies to advertise their product for either a monthly fee or product donations.

All that said, unless you plan to be really big, don't plan on actually making any profit. At MacSlash [macslash.org] we're happy that the site makes enough for us to go to a convention or two each year.