Share your experience in charging for banners? Open discussion.
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- tatelev
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 264
- Thanks: 1
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Hi people:
A subject that i don´t see discussed often among developers/webmasters is about banners and charging for them in your site.
i will soon start my worldwide site, expecting it to end up with a lot of visists, a lot of registered users, etc... It will be both in spanish and in english.
i decided to use PhpAdsNew server because of how robust seems to be and how seamlessly you can administer all the banners/customers, and the amount of statistics you can provide your customers. It´s also very easy to integrate with Joomla(both in module positions and in content items) and robust to manage too.
I have my doubts about what charging options to start with.
My first thougths are to have open room for advertising only in my homepage to start with:
In the right side
three consecutive 120x60 banners (banner A, banner B and banner C)
i thought of having banner A allways on(allways the same banner) and charging a monthly fee of let´s say for example 40us$.
Then in banner position B i would rotate between (ideally) 3 different banners(3 different customers) and charge, for example 15us$ each.
In banner position C i would do the same as in position B
Somewhere on the top
I would have room here for 1 banner position D. This would be the most priviledged place as it is the one that gets most of the eye exposure right away. let´s say i would leave the possibility for rotating 3 different 468 x 60 banners from 3 different customers and i would charge each 50us$ each month.
Please note that the conditions mentioned before are just out of my head as the first i can think of. Now lot of questions come to my mind, due to my completely lack of experience in charging for advertising, and in marketing/advertising: :-[
I know also that there are companies or even proffesionals that can take care of all this or charge you for consulting, but in my case this is roughly a one man´s project for now.
1) Is the proposed scenario good in any way, the prices i used as examples are way out of reality in any way? In that case, how do i reach acceptable prices? I know some of you might say: look at what the other websites that are already out there similar to yours are charging, but the reality is that either they have too flat prices or they don´t disclose them that easily. Also, in a way i feel that my website is going to fill a gap not covered by other similar websites.
2) Should the proposed scenario be more or less ok to start with, what happens if the site grows sooooo much in terms of content, traffic, visits that i am having a lot more than the 10 mentioned customers asking to have their banners in my site? Could i for example reach a situation in which i could say for example the 3 customers of position 3: "Look guys now instead of you 3 sharing that space it´s going to be 5....but don´t worry the number of views/clicks you´ll get on your banners will be equivalent, because the traffic has increased a lot"
For now this are the first questions i would like to leave open for discussion, and the people that already have experience on this, please share it
Thank you very much in advance,
NiCo
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- damo
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 2142
- Thanks: 0
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in my experience i've found that you've got to figure out how you're going to charge before you start thinking about how much
you cold charge on impression, click, purchase (if the person putting the banner has an affiliate system) or set a weekly or monthly fee for the banner, based on size and position. alternatively you could offer all options, which would then take you to how much you're going to charge, but i wouldn't advise offering that straight away until you've got some good traffic
how much you charge all depends on how busy the site is. if its a new site i'd strongly suggest using goolge to generate some revenue and joining an affiliate system. but you should always allow potential advertisers to see that you're happy for them to advertise on your site so a click through to a specific page on rates etc. will be needed. it's also good to contact companies by way of a simple email offering them space ... as long as you're not charging much some will take it.
for example, i charge £20 a month just for a link on the homepage of one of my sites and it doesn't matter the number of impressions or clicks that it gets, basically because they are doing it for search engine reasons more than anything, i suspect
saying that, i put a huge banner on www.astonvilla.biz for 32Red.com and they pay me a nice commission on whatever money someone spends on thier site ... it pays some good revenue
if you've got lots of traffic impressions or clicks is a good way to charge but then it's how much do you charge? not many people will pay for impressions and more prefer the click but then you've got to offer assurances about click fraud and you have to demonstrate that it's true figures and not just shoing an invoice each month
i guess what i'm saying, in this open discussion is, affiliate systems are good (but it takes time to find the right one), as is google but i prefer the monthly fee. if it's not a lot and you've got a good site, peopel don't mind paying £20 a month. £20 a monht isn' much but when you've got 20/30 people paying it, money coming in from google and affiliate systems it soon starts to mount up ... - www.c3p0.se - sweden
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- tatelev
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 264
- Thanks: 1
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Damo, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts and experience
i think that it has to be taken into consideration what other ways of advertising are ALREADY using this companies that you plan on offering to advertise on your website.
In my case i am definetely not going to put ads that have nothing to do with the content. So i will be selective, only companies related to the content of the website. This companies are from dance teachers, to dance festivals, to specialized dance clothes shop, dance venues, etc... they are already spending about that amount(u$30-40) for an ad in a monthly specialized paper magazine, in which they have around 10 pages of ads. The effectivity is relative, but they just HAVE to be there.
In my website i plan on having a big section of classified ads open for free to anybody, and properly categorized. In the future, after several months of the start of the site, i plan on charging a small monthly fee for being able to have a classified ad with a small banner or photo, hence more visible than the other free cclassified text ads. This is very similar to how the paper magazines do with classified ads.
I also plan on charging for being able to put a banner in different positions of the homepage, for which until now i only have the ideas i described in my first post, plus the experience shared by Damo. What i have my doubts is how to plan for the "sharing of the space". Going back to the example in my first post....how would i calculate the amount of different banners of different customers that i could end up having in one same position? in this case, it´s tempting to think the multiplying way: if i can have 3 guys paying is a lot better than 1!!! My doubts come also to how to explain that to the customer: "Look...in the start of the website you will probably be the only one having your banner there, but be advised that in the future you will share that space with up to 2 more banners"
And lately, i will have a content section(Joomla category) that will be something like current events&news, that anybody will be able to submit. In this category you will see from news about festivals, from news about scholarships or contests, to new book presentations or new CD´s presentations. I will publish a list of the, let´s say last 25 received in the homepage, as links(maybe with mod_roklatest), and then, in the future i have a separate module with 2-4 to which i might charge a fee for having their news or event link in a priviledged place separate from the big list of latest news i mentioned, also in the homepage.
As i mentioned, i am choosing phpadsNew for the banners in the homepage among other reasons because customers can log any time and see detailed statistics on impressions and clicks, per hour, etc...and/or have an email sent with the figures. I think that if the Ads are directly or closely related to the subject of the content, then the clicks lose a bit of importance. i imagine it must be similar to what happens in the specialized paper magazines in which they advertise. It´s not that much about finding out how many actually call them folllowing the ad in that magazine, but more about just HAVING to be there, same as his competitors. In a case as which i described i think that charging monthly for putting the ad is the most logical option, even though of course giving them detailed info on figures that show that the ad is being exposed(impressions) is cool. The paper magazines just give them figures of how many issues they print anyway.
Please keep on sharing your thoughts and experience and forgive me if i am talking about anything that sounds really crazy. I just have no experience at all in this subject, so i have to use my intuition to invent and imagine, until i get more of your valuable opinions
Thanks,
NiCo
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