i have a forum made for college students. i'm currently trying to gain as many members as possible. ideally i would like to have at least 20k users. once everything is established i would want to charge 1k for a banner ad at the top of the page. this would be for private advertisors. i'm not entirely sure about pricing so i'm wondering if that sounds attainable?
I think do be able to charge 1k for a banner ad, you would need at least 1,000,000 posts and a ton of traffic. I can't even get $50 for a banner ad on one of my forums, and it has over 70,000 members!
Because you are in the college niche it will be tough to get top dollar for ads. Most college students don't purchase a lot of things.
really you can't even get $50? well i live in a very business oriented small town. there are two streets in this town and they all have business with advetising EVERYWHERE. the local student newspaper charge $70 per day for a medium sized ad .. $140 a day for a large ad. there are plenty of businesses that cater to college students. so i would be looking at my forum in the same way. it would be prime advertising space if lots and lots of students were visiting the site. i mean 1k would be ideal .. but 100 to 200 would be nice too. just out of curiousity tjsocr what kind of money are you makin a month with adsense and that amount of members? thats one thing i've been curious about
chat to one of the large media networks like ad.com, adviva, etype etc as they may want you on their books - leave the ad negotiation to them and you just focus on building your community.
Well like many people have said you need to worry about the posts before ad prices. It's nice to have that as a goal but it might be better and easier to sell 10 ads for $100 each and rotate them. Also think about if you had a site would you pay 1k for your site advertisement? You need to look at similar forums and pm them asking what they charge and get a approx value of yours using that.