Best way to monetize a large travel website (mainly pictures)

Hello,

Our site, http://www.ianandwendy.com is mainly travel pictures, videos, journals/blogs, etc. Countries covered are all over the world. According to Analytics, we average 2000 uniques per day. We have a couple of PR5 pages, about a dozen PR4, and the rest are a mix. Our Alexa rank is about 115,000.

We wanted to check to see if anyone is aware of any affiliate/ppc programs we should investigate. At the moment, our revenue percentage is coming from:

textlinkads.com - 47%
adsense - 41%
private deals - 6%
textlinkbrokers - 3%
bookingwiz - 3% (just started, so I'm thinking that's a low number)

Anything that is per impression is bad for us, since we use a flash slideshow which has 1 impression count for the entire slideshow. (We have an alterntive non-flash slideshow that kicks in automatically for the crawlers and for anyone who might not have flash installed)

We've tried amazon, adbrite, bidvertiser, expedia, widgetbucks, that free brochure place, they all sucked. We are interested only in travel related ads.

We haven't tried private deals here much, they seem to be pretty cheap, and there's a lot of overhead with maintaining them.

Any other programs worth checking out that have a large travel ad inventory?

Thanks!

Ian

 

Hi Ian -

I'd recommend checking out some white label hotel affiliate programs. Depending on where you're traffic is coming from and the core regions your site covers, there are various potential partners including Venere, Bookings.com, WCTravel and others. Keep up with the BookingWiz partnership, though, they're effective and will probably work out well on your site, too.

Pete
EuroCheapo.com

 

try zanox.com

 

Have you try adsense?

 

Perhaps private deals/ offers would suit you best... tried Adsense .. has the best CPM..
Btw ...impressive site.. and impressive trips ...

 

Yeah, like I said in my OP, Adsense is my second highest earner. Thanks for the comments. In the past I haven't had much luck with affiliate deals where users need to complete a transaction in order to generate earnings.. I prefer the "per-click" earnings model.

Is there anything else like textlinkads out there, besides textlinkbrokers (which barely produces)? TLA is my highest earner, and while my adsense earnings are pretty steady TLA keeps growing substantially each month.

 

Ad-sense or a hotel affilaite are probably your best options