Selling Would You Pay $150/Month for a Banner on a Site Like This (900k Uniques, 10M PWs)?

I would like to see if there was interest in advertising on a site most of you would despise. First some stats:

- 900,000 uniques (10 Million pageviews) a month
- Google Panda resistant as 60% of traffic are bookmarks
- Bounce rate is below 30%
- Average time spent on site is 8 minutes
- On average each visitors visits 12 pages per visit
- Each post gets on average 50 comments (popular posts have 1,000+ comments)
- Each post gets on average 100 facebook likes (popular posts have 5k+ likes) but some of the posts also got hundreds of diggs or other social bookmarks
- 100% genuine traffic – no skims, no tricks. All surfers to the site are there because they want to be there. The site is well established, a leader in its niche. It’s a sought after house name – Google gets 6,000+ daily searches that contain site’s name
- Site has a loyal fan base. I have never bought nor traded traffic. The site is popular because it delivers exactly what surfers want and I’ve never cheated them in any way. 15,000 members with verified email addresses are currently subscribed to the site. The number that have the site bookmarked on their local machine is even greater
- The site is not stuffed with ads, as a matter it only has one vertical banner space in the sidebar and one regular banner that shows above each post

I have 4 years worth of Google Analytics to prove solid, unceasing popularity of the website. Would gladly grant access to pre-approved parties (sorry, don’t have time to deal with people who are just curious or nosy). At the time of this post, there were 911,676 unique visitors to the site in the past 30 days (soon to be 1 Million uniques a month and up from there on and on).

So far so good, I suppose. So here is the kicker – it is a reality news website, which basically translates into gore. The site reports on real life events and real life, as it turns out, is not always rose colored. There are both irresponsible as well as dangerous people out there and despite the fact that I have thousands of fan mails thanking me for showing people how vulnerable human bodies are and what reckless driving, or lack of knowledge that some dangerous group operates in one’s neighborhood can do to people, it still changes nothing on the fact that majority of internet tough guys would find the site like this offensive and upsetting. I’m not here to justify the purpose of the site as beating dead horses is not my idea of time well spent. I’m here to see if it would make sense to even offer it in this environment. However out of the respect for the community, I will not be publishing the URL here to avoid upsetting unwary individuals.

Despite attractive traffic stats, I was thinking of offering really low priced advertising packages if there was interest. My thoughts were:

- $250/Month on month to month basis
- $200/Month if paid for 3 months
- $150/Month if paid for 6 months.

The 3 and 6 months packages would come with an option to change the banner once every 7 days. I believe sometimes it takes a bit of trying to see what the traffic responds best to so if there doesn’t seem to be a reasonable feedback from one banner, try something else so you can maximize your return. I don’t want anyone to be stuck having to have the traffic come to the same site where it doesn’t seem to convert well for 6 months.

If I have any experts reading - what do you think? Am I being foolish? Would you advice against this tactic or price schedule? I won’t put more than 2 banners on the site, but if I get $150/Month per banner, that basically generates earnings that equal the cost of hosting for this type of busy site. Am I selling it too cheaply or what should I do?

PS - I’m open to discussion, however potentially interested webmasters should know that I respect my readers more than your money. I will not, under any circumstances advertise websites that would offend them. Anything selling a dream that never comes true (penis enlargement pills for example) will not be considered. Similarly, my site is 100% surfer safe and has always been. If your site is a pop up hell, has exit consoles, malware or other stupid $%#^, again, no matter how much money you’d offer, I won’t advertise it on my site. Decent, honest businesses are a safe bet. If you want to talk, send an email to munclefecker [at] yahoo Canada.

 

What is the usual CTR of the banners you are currently using?

 

As for actual banners on the site - I really don't know what CTR there is. The index page splash screen has a warning for people giving them an option to EXIT the site or ENTER at their own risk. I have the exit option linked to my own safe for work site and it receives on average 500 uniques referred by that splash screen per day.

Other than that, I don't have a mechanism in place to monitor the CTR of the banners. I've never run the site with profit in mind so my focus has always been on content, not on sale of advertising or maximization of monetization. Why do you think would I otherwise consider selling ad space for a price that barely covers server costs. I doubt there is another webmaster on this forum who pushes traffic through a single site comparable to mine and would sell a monthly banner for this little.

I'm pretty sure (as mentioned in OP), quality of the banner as well as the topic offered would greatly determine how many clicks the banner attracts. The traffic is there...

 

Please kindly PM me the URL, I would need to see the content before deciding.

 

Business is good, however please note that I would prefer to have interested parties to email me directly instead of by sending a PM through here.

 

Can i see the url , to see if it could match mind

Thank's