CPM & Contextual PPC Ad Network For Sale

url: www.premierad.com

PremierAd is CPM & contextual CPC ad network. Currently, there are approximately 1900 publishers, with perhaps 30-40 of them active. We serve the standard menu of cpm banners and contextual ppc text ads. These text ads are currently only run in-house, but we have a standing relationship with mamma to use their text ads through an xml feed. The previous owner also used looksmart in this way. We can also resell popunders through paypopup.com. These reseller relationships are not nearly as lucrative as in-house advertisers, however, they can pay the bills in lieu of the latter.

The (long) story: I bought this site on buysellwebsite.com in October for $4000 and have since spent $1500 on marketing (Adwords) and $300 on programming upgrades and improvements. I bought it from a guy who was a little (read: lot) vague and deceptive about the then current status of the site's advertisers and publishers. (He was asking $30k for the site, after doing my homework, I talked him down to $12k, then $10k, then we agreed on $5k. After I had the site in my hands I realized I was basically buying a clean slate, and knocked it down to the final $4k.) I knew that I hadn't been told the truth about the site's traffic, but felt that $4k was fair for the site itself, revenues or no, based on the development work, and the site's potential.

As I would soon learn, my biggest mistake was buying in without really understanding how the script works, and without really knowing the first thing about the site's hosting needs. I was just excited by the challenge of growing the business, and turning premierad into an ad network superpower.

Obviously, a lot of programming went into building the script, and the site does a lot of cool things. Tracking impressions, calculating revenues, etc. I spent the first month cleaning up the spelling and grammar, deactivating all the stagnant publishers, and booting all the publishers with incentivized traffic and/or non-english sites. I then started an aggressive adwords campaign to recruit some quality users. I got a couple serious (big time) advertiser inquiries, but hesitated to respond because I knew I didn't have the traffic to really satisfy their needs. In early December, I was contacted by the ad rep at a midwestern news group who said he could send 4 million impressions/month as a publisher if we could agree on a CPM. I jumped at the opportunity, realizing that I may be underwriting the initial expense until I could sign some advertisers. On the scheduled start date, he turned on the traffic, and Premierad immediately went down.

The pub was kind enough to hold while I spent the next five days troubleshooting, and switching to a host with a bigger dedicated server package. I told him to start it up again once I was ready. He did, and boom -- we went down again. After more investigating and talking to hosts, I came to the conclusion that the script was sufficient to do its job, but the server could not handle the traffic. In order to handle such a high volume I would need to upgrade to a constellation of dedicated servers, probably 5 total, at $300/mo each. So I had a dilemma: front the huge expense, plus front the publisher, and pray for advertising dollars to start coming in, or stick with what I had, and grow it slowly, building revenues in order to sustain hosting expenses that can support the slowly growing traffic.

That was all about a month ago. I have done nothing to the site since. My heart just went out of it. I never had a big thing for advertising in the first place, and all my previous webmaster experience had been in affiliate sites, so the hands-on, high-maintenance thing really kinda lost it's glamour when I realized I was tied to a job that didn't make any money yet.

So what this site needs: first and foremost: someone with a passion for advertising to grow and promote and and love this site. secondly, someone who can learn from my mistakes, and allow this site to grow slowly, or be prepared to invest to grow it more quickly. Your first job will be to contact the advertisers who have already contacted me, and to recruit new advertisers. meanwhile increasing your publisher traffic. Someone who has the server capacity that the high volume of traffic demands already would be the perfect new owner

The biggest potential of the site is it's quality programming, and the fact that it gets 4-5 new user signups (10-15 publishers for every one advertiser) every day, without paid marketing. It ranks 3rd on MSN for contextual advertising, 5th for PPC ads, and 7th on Google for contextual ads, plus the previous owner did a decent job of spreading the word through ad associations and message boards. It has a PR5, 147 pp indexed in Google, and 2690 in Yahoo. I have had several serious inquiries from brokers and ad agencies literally wanting to throw money at me. Here's an example:

"I am an online advertising agency and I have many very large clients. Is it possible to resell your services? My clients have large budgets and I have an NDA with them as well as a non-circumvent agreements. If you offer services for brokers such as myself, I can bring you lots of business as long as your networks can produce the volume, targeting and results I am looking for. I look forward to hearing from you."

So why haven't I responded to this guy? 2 things: 1. I Don't have the volume. Not yet, at least. and 2. because the embarrassment of disappointing that big customer stuck with me. I'm not looking to repeat it. Hence, my desire to sell to someone who is willing to put in the time and who knows hosting and php a little better than I.

stats:
average of 30,000 publisher impressions/day
revenues: none, to speak of.
age of site: since 3/03
publishers: approx. 1900, approx. 35 of which are active, earning between $10 and $100/month.
advertisers: approx 100, 3 of which are active.

Bidding starts at $2000, increments of $100. BIN set at $5000. Transaction to go through escrow.com. I'll cover the fees. I reserve the right to refuse the sale to anyone who weirds me out.

I hope I've covered it all. If not, feel free to PM your questions.

 

Wow thats quite a story

I am very interested but would like to see some of the script features before I put in a bid.

 

Great website - good luck on selling

 

this seems like a good oppportunity for somebody.

i am a bit surprised that 130,000 daily impressions would cripple your servers. i've seen plenty of $400 dedicated boxed easily handle adult sites which have 100,000 daily unique visitors and easily 10-100x the bandwidth that i'm guessing you go through...

 

Awesome network, good luck

 

Looks interesting, but I have two thing..site design is not great, looks not very advertising agency site(graphics are not smooth, footer font is kinda messed up).

Second, why advertiser, publisher should use this instead of hundreds of small to mid size agencies? What is the stand out?

 

What I understand from the programmer who helped develop the site, and the hosts I spoke with, is that the code that publishers put on their sites creates a high load of simultaneous requests on the server. Think of that one big pub getting hundreds of banner impressions simultaneously. Hence the need for serious power.

http://www.premierad.com/stats1.jpg
http://www.premierad.com/referrer1.jpg
http://www.premierad.com/referrer2.jpg
http://www.premierad.com/referrer3.jpg
http://www.premierad.com/referrer4.jpg

for anyone interested in seeing a bit more how the script works, feel free to sign up as either an advertiser or a publisher (or both!).

 

BIN pending payment at Sitepoint.