No... if someone buys banner ad space, it *replaces* the AdSense. AdSense is now secondary to the in-house system, not the other way around. Over time, as people buy more ad space I suspect the AdSense ads will be less and less. Essentially the AdSense is now just filler for unsold ad space.
Ah I see! So it was a silly question, sorry.. That's what you get when your members spend all night on your forum without sleep.. Lousy functionless 10:30am brains! Shawn, make DP less addictive so I can sleep more and ask less ridiculous questions? xD I do apologise.. Chuckun
I would probably be interested in advertising on your site IF I could choose which forum categories I want to advertise in AND if I can advertise on a CPC basis - NOT CPM
You can... Click "View my ads" (Top left) Click "Create new ad" And you'll see the options. Edit: Ooops, didn't read that... "Area filtering for Inline Text Link ads is not yet supported."
Truthfully I'm not sure if forum filtering will ever work with the CPC inline links. It's a pretty "expensive" query that would need to be run 20 times per page view (each post that you can see). The resources required to do it are pretty high for something that doesn't seem that important to me... I mean if I want user's interested in "buy web design services", do I care what forum they were just in?
Suggestion : As for Banners can we have a small badge beside the banner that would link to the DP profile page/Itrader page. That would really help both the potential buyer as well as advertiser.
No, i'm pretty sure it's someone viewing the page through google translate ^_^ But I could be wrong..
The minimum CPM bid is actually low. it's quite a bit lower than what AdSense pays us for running CPM ads, so... On top of that, advertisers have the ability to run CPM ads only in certain relavent areas for their ads. For example they can choose to run a "Web Hosting" ad only in the web hosting section. Banner ads at $1 CPM is *really* cheap when you factor in they can also be targeted based on relevance. People can still run CPM ads here via AdWords site/placement targeting if they wish, but there are a lot of advertisers bidding on those spots already, so the cost is typically going to be $4-6 CPM and they don't have the ability to target specific forums or sub-domains.
Added a little "bonus" for high bidders for banners. If your banned ad is picked for the position in the header and you are the exclusive high bidder (doesn't count if someone bids the same and you just happened to get the spot), your banner advertisement will slide in with an animation. Nothing too big, but a little bonus that will draw a little extra attention to it.
I agree that "country" is an arbitrary level of granularity as the country with the highest traffic would be getting well over 10000 times the visitors compared to the least traffic country. But, at the same time, I think that continent is just granular, not rational. I would recommend that you use your historic data to decide the basis of granularity. You could revisit this once a year or something. For instance, USA, India, UK and a few other countries with high traffic (as well as membership) can have their own categories. While Africa probably can go as a continent. These are just examples as I do not have your data, but I guess you get what I am saying. I have seen many impressions on "Liverpool Offices" today, and feel guilty that I am making that poor chap pay CPM when there is no way I would be in India and still be interested in a Liverpool office.
Down the road once we roll out geographical targeting, I think I'm going to make it continent by default on the front-end, but the backend selecting a continent actually selects each country that make up that continent. Then if the user *wants* to edit further maybe have an advanced option where they can then modify the country selections that were made when they picked the continents.
A few minor additions... Ads descriptions are limited to 125 characters to prevent the bottom of descriptions being cut off in some banner formats. It's not retroactive though, so the existing descriptions over 125 characters will still be over 125 characters (and will basically look the same as they have been with the bottom of the description being cut off). There is now a 3rd advertising option... Email Ads.