A company approached me today to buy advertising on one of my websites. The site I'm talking about is about consumer electronics and gadgets and the company that wants to advertise is pretty well known in this field. They want to put banner ads on my site and I suppose it's mainly for branding purposes. Great news for me but the issue is that I don't know how much my ad inventory is worth. When I search on Google I find price lists of sites run by media companies that charge anywhere from $10 to $30 per CPM and in some cases even much higher. I don't want to make them an unreasonable high offer but I also don't want to be leaving too much money on the table. So the question I have is: for how much are big sites actually selling their CPM ads these days?
It depends. Do you want them to continue to advertice with you, or do you want as much as you can get? Too many sites charge WAY too much! It explains why they have such a high turn-over rate. Go check out the big shots out there. Askmen, iVillage, MSN, and others. How much are they charging? Well, I can tell you how much Askmen is. They are a rip off! Once you got all the figures together, undercut them by at least 30%. Then advertise that fact for future advertisers. Ask this co. where they are advertising. Look up the rates, and undercut them. Hope it works out for you, Fred. TheList.FM
Bigger sites like that aren't about keeping all of their advertisers, and you can't compare them to smaller sites. A lot of advertisers go with larger publication-style sites for seasonal or one-time ad deals to promote the launch of something during that phase, to take advantage of a seasonal or monthly editorial focus from the site's editorial calendar, etc. It's not a rip-off if they're getting massive exposure to a highly targeted audience.