Generating Revenue with On-Line Ads?

ratajik asks: "In my continuing quest to generate revenue from my open source project, I've been attempting to use on-line ads. What are other Slashdot users' experiences with on-line ads? Which are the best methods (presentation, click-through, purchase, etc.), and which are the best companies that you've deal with?"

"I've tried several at this point, and have had the best result from Google's AdSense - but even that hasn't been great. I've gone the user-most-purchase route with Connection Junction, but with 498,000 impressions in 1 month, have had zero sales. AdSense has worked a lot better (as users just need to click through), but I'd like to see a higher Clickthrough rate. What other companies have you dealt with and what has your experience been? What have you found to be the best type of Ad and Ad placement on your site? What management and tracking tools have you found that work best? If you've rolled your own web ads (e.g., not using an aggregator), what did you use to do it and how did you find advertisers?I've personally tried staying away from ads on my web sites, but some of the AdSense-type ads are minimally annoying, and seem like a good way to generate a bit of revenue off of free software, especially considering Internet advertising revenue was at a record 2.3 billion in the first quarter of 2004."

Yeah

[daeley]

especially considering Internet advertising revenue was at a record 2.3 billion

How much you wanna bet that $2.2 billion of that was pr0n? ;)

Re:Yeah

[rice_web]

$500 million of the remaining billion was a user trying to get a free iPod by shooting the terrorist.

Old school

[agent dero]

It'll be damn near impossible to generate much revenue from your site through those type-of-ads.

The best bet would to setup a donation button, and point out that your project survives off donations.

Or if your product is nifty enough, and many folks use it, pay-for-support.

At last resort, you can put a neato logo on a t-shirt for cafepress.com ;)

Re:Old school

[lambent]

For an example of the donation button, check out:

The Donation Box at E2 [everything2.com]

Can anyone think of any other large, donation based projects that publish their revenues?

Also, Jonathan Rosenberg of Goats [goats.com] seems to have the whole 'pay me, pretty please' thing down pretty well. Just perusing his site should be a 101 course in internet capitalism.

It might help to describe what kind of project you're working on, to get a better sense of what sorts of commercial options would be most appropriate.

Re:Old school

[Seumas]

Unfortunately, donations don't always work. I run an auction site that has been around for many years and has quite a few users. However, the donations aren't even enough to keep up with the monthly expenses (which aren't a whole lot really).

You can't expect people to give money that they don't have, but it's still a difficult situation when people want your site to stay around and make frequent use of it (and it is based on monetary transactions between other users to begin with), but you're stuck paying

Re:Old school

[tenco]

to find out that the average internet user doesn't even notice when a site does not have ads.

..or he/she has an adblocker.

Re:Old school

[Spudley]

Hmmm..... Cafepress has not worked for me. I'm sure others have done well from it, but I think to make more than the tiniest amount from it, you're going to have to put quite a bit of work into it.

I agree with you about Google adsense - it's hardly earning an earth shattering amount, but it is earming a lot more for me than cafepress.

I think the popularity of these two speaks for itself. I've tried a few others, but in all honesty, I don't think there is anything else out there in the general market that is earning money for web sites. You might get something that works better if it's specifically targetted to your site, but in general, my advice is to stick with google adsense, and be happy with what you get.

Most of the other advertising services won't get you as much, and despite the large amount quoted, most of the money going into the advertising industry is staying there.

Finally, I wouldn't bother with donations either, unless you have an insane amount of traffic. It won't get you much, and it'll make you feel cheap when you do get anything.

You're asking /. ?

[YrWrstNtmr]

The best type of ads to display on your website?

You're asking the bastion of ad blocking/workarounds/avoidance? The very center of "free"?

Dude...you are gonna get so flamed.

I work for an advertising company...

[neiras]

... and any of the salespeople will tell you, targeting is key. Find a company that doesn't simply sell you blocks of "anonymous" impressions. Ask about their audience. Ask about ad 'inventory' that is targeted at people that are interested in your product's general area. It's usually better to buy clicks rather than impressions - you're more likely to get interest from people who have already clicked on your ad! Also, stay on top of your campaigns. If you aren't converting, call the advertising company and ask for it to be re-trafficked or re-targeted. Otherwise you'll get absolutely raped.

Re:I work for an advertising company...

[Enfors]

Uhmm, I think you're misunderstanding. He doesn't want to advertise his product / service - he wants to put other people's ads on his web site.

... Because I Don't Know How To Read

[tomblackwell]

The advice you're giving would be perfect for those people wishing to buy advertising on this guy's site.

looking at

[way2trivial]

http://www.google.com/
"Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages"

so, advertising revenue, by one count, averages 50 cents, per web page, per year...

beat 50c per page at your site, in a year, and count yourself lucky....

Your Logic Is Quite Flawed

[tomblackwell]

There is no guarantee that every one of those pages has advertising on it. You would have a much more reasonable number if you took the total count of pages with advertising and divided by the total take.

Re:Your Logic Is Quite Flawed

[way2trivial]

Of course
but there is no way to easily figure that # of pages..

I'm sure the NY times has a larger than average return for a webste, I'm also sure personal AOL pages return diddly..

I was merely trying to suggest to the OP, that he shouldn't expect to 'retire early' based on ad revenue..
he might be able to cover his hosting fees, but by mentioning that ad rev amounted to 2.3 billion, sounds like "ooh, big numbers, how do I get a piece" I'm suggesting, that's a minute # compared to the volume of

Re:Your Logic Is Quite Flawed

[Dyrandia]

I agree. I think the dot.com bust taught us that we'll perhaps cover hosting, but there isn't a really good model of advertising on the net. The old method of

1. Whack adverts on your pages
2. ???
3. Profit!

just doesn't work.

I think an empassioned plea to those who use your project might be worth a try. If you're the only contributor to your project, this might not work, but perhaps a method like fark.com's totalfark would be good. Give the code contributors a chance to buy a personal diary page that's spac

No Flash

[MBCook]

I must say, my personal pet peeve would have to be flash ads. You can see them everywhere. Slashdot pages tend to have them, but even worse are the sites where you can have 3 or 4 on screen at once.

They suck CPU, they are often just plain annoying (flashing and such, no pun intended). Many times they are doing things that a simple animated GIF could do. I think there are MUCH better uses for Flash than ads, and I wish companies would get that through their heads.

There are many ways to generate revenue. Google AdWords (as mentioned in the submission), a "Donate" button (as mentioned in another post), blackmailing, whatever. But please, don't allow flash ads.

Re:No Flash

[GeorgeH]

Try FlashBlock [mozdev.org], which will stop Flash animations from playing unless you click the Play button.

Re:No Flash

[cyborch]

or even better: adblock [mozdev.org]. Not exactly the same functionality, but a very powerful ad blocker indeed.

Re:No Flash

[mwilliamson]

I use firefox w/adblock extension. Here [tamucc.edu] is my list of sites (importable into adblock) generating almost all banner traffic, including the annoying flash-based ones. I rigged a few PC's to auto-populate this list from their blocklist every day.

Software and Money

[ratajik]

I've actually considered embedding Ads in the main StationRipper [stationripper.com] window... but don't' know if that would be overly annoying. And showing something like Google ads may be against the rules...

What I would really like to find is an aggregator that pays per impression... but DOESN'T do pop-ups, unders, animated ads with sound, etc. While most people use pop-up blockers these days, I refuse to do something that annoying.

Is there some OTHER way other open source developers are making money off of smaller products like this, besides donations and ads? I doubt the pay-for-support route will work for something like this. While I wouldn't ever expect to make a lot, it would be nice to cover costs + have a bit left over to invest in the next development machine.

I'm actually a bit of a cross-roads with the software. I've got some ideas to expanding it a lot, fix a lot of things users want fixed and add a lot of new function - but is it worth continuing down that path, or start working on something else that may be a bit more sales-oriented? So far I've done it 'cause I love programming and it was something interesting and useful to work on - but it's mostly been (lots) of support, and very little code as of late.

-Greg

Re:Software and Money

[Kris_J]

I've actually considered embedding Ads in the main StationRipper window... but don't' know if that would be overly annoying.

Well, here's one data point for you. I won't install any application that does this unless I know I can turn them off either with an option, a hack or by buying the product if I know it's worth it even before I install it.

Eudora is the only product that does this that I use. I bought Opera for my N-Gage, but I've *never* installed the ad-sponsored version on any PC. Basically ad-s

Re:Software and Money

[dtfinch]

I used StationRipper for a few days. A very interesting program. It captured gigs of online radio music in a very short period. The only downside was that the resulting mp3s where usually miscut by several seconds. I suppose there's not much you can do about that unless you decode that area of the mp3 to identify the period of silence, almost another project in itself.

Re:Software and Money

[natmsincome.com]

One of the things that works we'll is value add. Think Evolution and the Connector.

Here's some examples that could work:
Free Abiword - Charge for Templates.
Free Art - Charge for the Catagorised Version with searching.
Free Music - Charge for a Cover + Bio + Interview etc

Basically the thing they buy is more of a token that allows people to get something and feel good giving you money.

For your product I'd consider trying to get a comision off the BUY button also see if you get a Amazon "People who liked tha

Only way to go.

[dtfinch]

Put a donate button on your web page and in the about box of the program (if it has one). Braham Cohen, author of BitTorrent, was very successful going one step further and giving users a one time popup reminder to donate. Something like "Have you made a donation yet?" and it sends you to a donation page if you click no.

Re:Only way to go.

[ratajik]

Yep, I've made way more off donations then Ads at this point. But I'm average about .0011 cents per user. Well, download, hard to get a handle on actual daily users. Which is GREAT, I'm shocked and amazed people donated, but I wouldn't mind adding to that, if I can figure out a non-annoying way to do it :)

I've thought about doing a one-time pop-up. I'll give it a bit more thought before I release the next version :)

I've also thought of a related service that could (COULD) be subscription-based (not th

Re:Only way to go.

[Run4yourlives]

Don't bother with a pop-up.

1. It'll piss off those that see it.
2. Most people (considering your project is open) won't see it at all if they've set their browsers to block em.

Waste of your time, really.

My experinces

[arrow]

There are pretty much 3 levels of advertising:

Top Tier - TribalFusion, Burst Media, etc.
Highest payoff, you want to work with these guys, but they are very picky. Tribal for instance only represents 5000 or so sites. You need to be pushing 20k+ sets of eyeballs (not just impressions, but individual people) a day before they will return your calls.

Second Tier - Google AdSense, MarketBanker, etc.
Below average payoff, but they will accept almost anyone with a legitimate site. But if your seeing less than 10k impressions a day, it will be a good 6 months to a year before you've made enough to get a check mailed to you.

Third Tier - AdDynamix, AllClicks, etc.
Bottom of the bucket pay rates. But they will take any impression they can get. When you hear people complain about things like skimming, and commissions not being paid, etc. these are the type of networks that are involved.

Long story short... It all comes down to traffic. 400k impressions per month may seem a lot, untill you try to make money off of that volume.

Your best bet for supporting an opensource project would be to solicit donations or sponsors. Failing that, try to sell your own ad space to companies that fall in your target group. (i.e. if your writing video card drivers, try getting a gaming site to advertise with you)

On the other hand, if you can create something that people love and use on a regular basis, you can support yourself off it. Right now I bring in more a month from Google AdSense than I do at my decent paying IT day job. I'm expecting even more when I convert all my inventory over to TribalFusion.

Subscriptions

[miyako]

You might think about something like a subscription service. For uses willing to fork over a token amount per month/6-months/year they see no ads and can (if they want) get e-mail updates about the latest versions, maybe other nice things. Of course depending on how your site is set up this might end up costing more to set up than it's worth.
It just seems to me that banner ads today are less about making money through view/clicks and more about making money by driving people to subscribe to an ad-free version of the site.

it don't work

[stonebeat.org]

trust me. you can not generate revenue from online ADs. Take Eric Raymond advice and sell mugs, t-shirts etc with your logo [xml-dev.com]. That is better way to generate to revenue then to put AD banners. I used cafepress.com to create a online store to sell mugs and tshirts [cafeshops.com] and it was pretty easy and effective.

Adsense is darn accurate, but sometimes funny ...

[xmas2003]

I run Adsense on my personal web site [komar.org] ... and am generally pleased with it - pays the hosting bills ... but I'm not retiring early, since on my good days, I can "Super-Size" it at McDonalds! ;-)

I don't pay too much attention to the ads since it kinda runs by itself, and my experience is that Google does a pretty darn good job targetting 'em ... but I sometimes get a bit of a chuckle out of what shows up - for instance, I have some Lunar Eclipse Pictures [komar.org] and one of the Adsense ads was some place selling real estate on the moon! ;-) [moonshop.com]

Re:Adsense is darn accurate, but sometimes funny .

[Kris_J]

As an aside, you can see what adsense would come up with on your site by copying the frame address from another website then substituting your URL into the address. It was interesting running it over my personal site. I'd give you an example, but I upgraded my ad filter recently and it kills adsense now.

I got lunar WEB HOSTING as an AdSense Ad

[herrvinny]

I got the below when I clicked on your page:

• Lunar Pages Web Hosting
  
  Low cost reliable web hosting. 800MB of storage for $7.95/mo. aff
• LunarPages Secrets
  
  The reasons why you Should and Should Not host with LunarPages.
• Lunar Pages
  
  Web Hosting for real Webmasters Taking your site higher - Aff.
• Lunar Pages Web Hosting
  
  Responding Personally to All Your Hosting Needs. Give us a try! aff

Yeah, Google here totally screws it up, since it's associating lunar hosting (start the jokes

Re:I got lunar WEB HOSTING as an AdSense Ad

[xmas2003]

Thanx for the click-thru - yea, they are kinda confused, but I guess it's the best they could do - at one time, they were showing ads for the Mitsubishi Eclipe car ... so they got it wrong that way too! ;-)

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[account_deleted]

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Affiliate Programs

[Fished]

Consider doing an affiliate program with Amazon or someone like them. In the past, I did fairly well doing book reviews with affiliate links.

Avoid Connection Junction

[TheWanderingHermit]

I have a site in a field totally unrelated to computers. It was ranked as an "Editor's Choice" (or something like that) on AOL at one point. From my server logs, I KNOW it gets a fair amount of traffic (I also have free downloads, logs show these files are downloaded -- and the pages linking to the files are viewed).

I wanted to see if I could make enough to at least pay for hosting, and looked around and settled on trying Connection Junction. I don't remember for sure, but I think I was supposed to get paid on click-throughs.

For the next few months, I was getting a good number of page views, but according to Connection Junction, their banners received 4-6 impressions per month, way off from what my server logs showed for page views. Maybe they're honest, but after that experience (seeing my logs showing hundreds of page views per month and CJ showing 4-6 impressions/banner views for the same month), I don't trust them.

Re:Avoid Connection Junction

[Zerth]

Conjunction junction doesn't pay by impression, they pay, depending on the ad, by clickthrough or by number of "actions", which is usually either an actual sale or the viewer filling out a form. A company I just interviewed with uses them and they only pay per sale.

As it was explained to me, it's not entirely as assholish as it sounds, the sale doesn't have to come by clickthrough, it just has to be within a certain time of the impression. Well, unless all your site's viewers block the cookie, then you're screwed.

Re:Avoid Connection Junction

[TheWanderingHermit]

And my dealing with them is so long ago, I don't know if they may have used a different model back then. I do remember seeing my site logs showing a MUCH higher viewing rate than their logs showed (like on a factor of several hundred or so).

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[account_deleted]

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Have a dollar...

[k4_pacific]

I just went to your site and clicked on an ad.

Re:content

[RobertB-DC]

However, if your site is about Luxury cars or expensive network equipment, you will most likely much more money per clickthrough. As I mentioned in another post, I get $1 to $7 per clickthrough, however, I'm lucky if I get one or two clickthroughs per day. The demand just isn't that high for stuff like that. Now if I was running pr0n banners on a site that served pr0n, I'd probably get a ton more clickthroughs, but probably a fraction of a cent for each one.

There's the rub... the price Google pays depends

1997 called

[notsoclever]

They want their business model back.

what are

[cassidyc]

these online ads you speak of.... oh hold on I'll turn off proximitron.

Ahhh, those.

Nah I don`t think they'll take off

CJC

Get on Slashdot's front page maybe?

[Wee]

You're there, man. You got news of your project posted to Slashdot's front page. That's a pretty well-targeted market, if you ask me. Plenty of OSS geeks here, many of whom would surely donate. Well done, man. Seems like you've had some pretty good (free) advertising already. And luckily you've got your project's name figured out, the online marketing strategy all whiz-banged up, and finally you're on Slashdot's home page, telling the world about your project, asking how to best market it and get a li

Re:Get on Slashdot's front page maybe?

[ratajik]

I had actually had the project name and a link in the original submit :)

But am ok with it as it ended up - I really want some answers and suggestions to this (and I've gotten a couple of really good ones), not just more traffic.

Not a bad start ...

[Too Much Noise]

... you got the /. front page, that will generate some traffic ... erm ... provided your server can handle it. Now if you can use traffic logs to convince advertisers that your site is heavily visited, you may get a swing at ads ;-)

Does anyone besides advertisers like ads?

[timminator]

Basing your business on some imaginary market of users with an insatiable appetite of clicking ads all day doesn't really make much sense in the OpenSource arena.

Try making money the proven, old fashioned way by focusing on delivering goods and/or services that have a profitable value proposition for your customers.

Re:Does anyone besides advertisers like ads?

[bholub]

"OpenSource arena.... profitable" - I don't get it?

purpose of your site and targetting

[Zugok]

It may just depend on the type of site you run. Obviously the ads should be targetted to you audience. I will be launching a site shortly based on scoop which has this fantastic idea that ads have their own section and you can comment on the ads. What I plan to do is use this concept of an ad's section and turn it into a job classifieds sections where recruiters can "buy a story" to advertise a job. Recruiters pay big bucks in my industry.

Per Ad View

[mbrinkm]

Since I don't have any actual experience in selling advertising space on any of the sites I manage(d) I don't know what potential is out there. But, I do know that there was a study done a couple years ago on the effectiveness of Internet Advertising as compared to TV advertising. This study found that any viewing of an add on a website had the same impression value as a 30 second TV commercial(link [www.nua.ie]). It seems to me that because of this, you could charge a flat fee for ad space based on the "lasting impr

It's Commission Junction!

[uvince]

Just to be clear, that's Commission Junction, not Connection Junction and most certainly not Consumption Junction. ok, carry on.

I know someone who can help.

[weeboo0104]

He sent me an email today offering to send my website to over 30,000,000 email addresses!

I rolled my own

[Randym]

If you've rolled your own web ads (e.g., not using an aggregator), what did you use to do it and how did you find advertisers?

My site is affiliated with a local entertainment magazine. We are located in a town with a major public university. My boss is computer-phobic, so I am in charge of the website. It occurred to me that people advertising in our magazine could be posting ads on the website. During the school year we get about 60,000 pageviews/month; during the summer about 45,000.

I divided the website into 4 virtual directories with approximately equivalent pageviews so that people could target users based on what kind of pages they were looking at. Each of those directories has its own ads directory. The ads are strictly banner ads, and there is only one per page (at the top). I have never gotten any complaints from users about the ads, which are visible but unobtrusive.

In each of the 4 ad directories is 1 PHP page / advertiser. My algorithm counts the number of ads in the ad directory (actually it counts the number of pages in that directory with a .php extension), then randomly chooses one to display. (The ads themselves may point to a graphics directory one level deeper.) Needless to say, it is very useful to have executable PHP code in an ad.

I priced the ads pretty low (about $25/month to cover all four areas), but then found, much to my surprise, that the ad staff doesn't want to sell them because they won't make very much in commissions. However, I've been doing OK because people see an ad and call up to see if *they* can get one.

For the future, I'd like to write some code that enables advertisers to specify day and time selections (for example 75% of our traffic comes between 9-5 M-F). I am also thinking of rewriting the Restaurant Guide page so that I can toss up a random restaurant as an ad.

My business model is a little old-fashioned (impressions), but I am considering an alternative way of charging (clickthroughs, but with a higher price per clickthrough, compared to the price per impression). So far I am making very little money, but I am planning an offensive for this summer that entails contacting everyone who advertises in our magazine that also mentions a URL in their ad: "Got a website? Where is your traffic coming from?"

I hope that this was helpful.

Other methods

[BenjyD]

I run Adsense on my project site, and haven't made a whole lot of money, mostly due to the low page impressions I get (3000 unique IPs/month).

I have made a reasonable amount of money (~$500) out of the project through donations from a company to implement specific features in the software for them, about half of which has gone in supporting the project (server and testing hardware costs).

I've idly kicked around a few ideas for making money off the project, including selling plugins for the main, free, pro