Best ad network for my sites... and any other advice

Hello,

I manage a bunch of sites that each get almost 1 million visits a month. (managing sites is what I do, so I’m getting more of these niche sites every month.) To date the sites have zero advertising on them. I have now been tasked to get some advertising going on them. I’m in way over my head at this point, so I’m starting to do my due diligence….

The advertising needs to be clean, no adult, gambling, alcohol, dating, etc… VERY VERY strict on this.

The sites are very age group and user focused. So my questions are:

Am I better off going with finding individual advertisers, an ad network, or running a combination of both?

Any advice on getting in with individual advertisers? (ie how, who, and what do I need)

CPM is going to be the way I want to go on this, how do I determine what my sites are worth, the basic searches say I should get somewhere between $0.1 and $30 per CPM. Even if I go with some of the chatter I have heard in my segment it is $3 to $10, that is quite the range when you are talking this many impression per month.

What are the top ad networks that I should consider? (Advertising.com, tribalfusion.com, etc…)

What ad serving software is best? I've been looking at OpenX and adbutler, but I have also seen that some of the ad networks have their own.

Is it bad to go with an ad networks ad serving if you want multiple sources?

Thanks and all advice welcome…..

Dan

 

Would you allow people to buy from you directly?

 

I'm thinking we would do a combination of ad networks and direct advertising sales.

 

I've had the best success with that method. Every time I've done both, advertisers buying from the networks will find out they can buy from mr directly and start dealing with me directly.

 

What ad server tool do you use or recommend? We are currently looking at OpenX, but I'm open to just about anything. I am not responsible for the content of the sites I manage so ideally I would like the owners of the sites to add in one block of code and be done, thus I need to use an ad serving package that manages the content that will displayed.

 

I wrote my own that does pay per click.

 

I do PPC and made a good amount in a few days.

 

join tribalfusion, valueclick, burst media and other top cpm networks. Some might be hard to get into. PM me if you need mor help

 

We are looking for new publishers to join our network Fidelity Media. Clean, brand safe advertising and attractive rates.
Welcome to sign up!

 

Thank you for the advice. Is there an ad serving solution that will work with all of these as well as any direct advertising that I secure? The situation I'm trying to work out is that there are going to be a bunch of sites that I manage the advertising for that I do not have direct control of to make changes to the content. So I will need the web masters of those sites to add the advertising code to their sites and I would prefer that they only have to do that once.

For example I have looked at OpenX and Adbutler and they allow me to create a single code snipit that will serve all my direct ads but I have no idea if they work with any of these ad networks. Does anyone have any experience serving both direct ads and ad network ads though something like OpenX or other ad serving software?

Also if you have any advice on how to secure large advertisers that would be appreciated as well

 

I use openx with vb4 and it works very well. I'm curious to learn what digitalpoint is using? Is is openx as well with some nice code changes to custom fit vb4? Its setup really well here.

 

what is vb4 for the newbie here

 

vbulletin.com is a CMS (content management system) and is what this site is running with some very well added tweaks and mods.