I recently got some offers from potential advertisers via email. They want to advertise on my site, and are asking what I am charging. Quite frankly, I have no idea. I would appreciate some suggestions. For starters, I have a busy forum which gets over 50,000 pageviews a day. Alexa ranking of 54,000, and a lot of traffic coming in from Google searches. Here are some of the questions I have been asked: I would like to buy advertising space on your web site. Please send me your offer in this format: 1) your web site url 2) price per month for adding contextual link at the home page 3) price per month for adding contextual link at the inner page 4) price per month for adding a page (with a unique content that I will send) with our link 5) price per month for adding small 125x125 banner at home or inner page
It depends largely on your site's content/niche, the location of ads, amount of ads, and quality of traffic. But I'll give you some guidelines based on my experience. Typically, forums have lower CTR's, since there are a number of regulars who see the ads again and again. If you have a generic forum that has very general topics, and if the majority of your traffic comes from the US, Canada, or UK, then I would give a rough estimate of around $0.50 - $0.30 for a few 728x90, 300x250, or 160x600 banners. To give you a general idea, I own a YouTube based forum, and receive between $0.75 and $0.50 for most of my traffic. If you have a niche you can target, you'll always get better rates as opposed to having a general discussion forum. For a 125x125 banner, usually you can place a few of those. Usually these spaces go for about 1/3 of the cost of a standard banner size. If you have a lot of advertisers looking for space on your site, go with the 125x125 banners. If you imagine, you can fit x4 of these banners in a 300x250 space. On the other hand, if you cannot sell all of your 125x125 inventory, you'll end up losing money as opposed to having a standard ad size that you can backup with most networks. If you go with a standard banner size, you can charge just above whatever network you use is paying you. For instance, if you use Adsense and are making $0.30 eCPM, then charge your small advertisers $0.40 CPM, and advertisers that purchase a large amount of traffic $0.35 CPM. You can play around with tiering prices. Generally, its always better if someone buys all of your traffic (or a lot of it). You should be careful about adding paid links on your site. If you have a lot of links that are irrelevant or linking to sites with a bad reputation, Google and other search engines might penalize you for it. The price for links should be based on your Page Rank, CTR, and out-bound link ratio. Check the CTR of ads on your site, for a forum, you might notice something around 1%. If you have tons of out-bound links on your page, that'll make the links worth less than if you had only a few. Give us some more information on this, and we'll be able to give you a solid price range that you might consider charging. For the keyword-loaded article with links that they want you to post for them, I'd say charge them around $2 CPM for actual views that you anticipate the article will receive (including views on your homepage if you feature the article there), + a charge based on your PR.
Thank you very much! I still find it a bit difficult to translate the CPM I would like to charge them into an actual lump sump charge per month, though.
Try and predict how much traffic you'll receive over the next month. If you have a pretty solid stream of 50,000 views each day, and want to charge $0.30 CPM, just multiple 50x30x.3 = $450. Some advertisers don't want to spent that much money up front, so its good to be able to serve multiple ads using an ad server. You might also want to apply to BuySellAds. Its a self-serve exchange. You'll probably get a few new advertisers from their network, you can also send people that contact you to your BSA page. They take 25% of your earnings, but its usually worth it to be exposed to the extra advertisers they have. Since its mostly a self-serve exchange, it may take a few months for your site to attract advertisers.