Here's my question. I'm gonna be starting an online business soon. Aside from selling my main product, I also want to sell advertising (ad space, pay-per-click, etc). I honestly believe that my site is gonna be one of the most popular in the world. So with that said, I want to set my site up to sell advertising like facebook has their's. I don't know much about this kind of thing, so I was hoping that someone could point me in the right direction.
Do you have funding? Facebook did it with $500M in funding (after they get hundreds of thousands of visitors), just so you know. Otherwise they won't even close to what they are today.
"I honestly believe that my site is gonna be one of the most popular in the world" good luck.. what i would suggest is getting to that stage first then worrying about an ad platform
Don't have funding now. I'm thinking of doing this after the site gains popularity and makes lots of money from selling our product. I don't know much about this part of the web, so I'm asking so I can have an idea of how it would go when I'm ready for that.
I suggest you get in contact with a big CPM company like tribalfusion etc. For now, let them handle your ad serving needs. Once you start making around 1,000 a day you can start putting money aside to build you own ad platform. Try looking around for some pre-built ad serving platforms, I'm sure there are some out there....
You're question is a bit vague. What do you mean like facebook? You mean how it's set up? how's displayed? How it functions?
They display their ads through a specialized section, probably a custom script built in PHP. You can't really have an exact advertising platform like Facebook, but you can mimic it for your site.
That actually really doesn't mean anything in business terms, in design terms, and in programming terms. The only thing a publisher needs to to sell advertising is consistent traffic. Forget about facebook, think about how you're gone get people to come to your site and stay on your website. When you get at least 100k visitors a month, maybe publishing ads will become a viable thing for your business. The "me too" mentally in ebusiness is the best way to fail
Like I said in my original post, I don't know much about online advertising and how it works. So I just used facebook as an example, since I know that they make their money by selling advertising. If I could edit my post, I would add in that I meant adding advertising as a "later on" thing.
I think anything is possible online, I've seen a lot of guys make good money. So why not you. Best of luck. The way facebook did it is quiet simple. It's the same way plentyoffish did it. You need two things: a reason for people to come to your site, and a reason for people to come back to your site again and again and again. It's getting those 2 things that's really hard. If your site doesn't have anything of value that's really different and better then your competitors it won't work. I saw some people write If your site has something that's perceived as better to the customers, you can surpass and shut down facebook in a year! This has happened many times on the web, there is zero loyalty. If you're really better, people will switch overnight. good luck