A little while ago, I inquired into the advertising rates on this website (forum). It is a high-end sports car niche site (link). It seemed like a good site and I was willing to pay for great advertising. I wasn't prepared for the rates I was quoted though! I was shocked at these rates! If you just take the small banner prices (which end up in a right column on every page) and break it down to 35px high units, it comes out to about $2,700 / year average for that space. I counted and estimated there is at least 100 35px units stacked up on the right column of that site!!! What am I missing here! Is this guy a marketing genius and making over $270,000 a year on this site or am I missing something?
Looking at the forum it does look active and im guessing atleast some of those members own very expensive cars, So its possible he did sell those banners at the same price. But also some of them could have been exchanges where he placed an add on there site and vise versa. Or he gave them lower prices.
It sounds a lot when it's said quickly, but average out the price of a small banner to a week's cost for an advertiser and it's small beer compared to a - for example - adwords campaign - and targeted. So blimey, yeah, looks like he's raking it in.
He is probably high balling you on the intitial offers, but xx,xxx yearly rates for a site of that quality is not unreasonable.
$3K a year comes out to about $8 per day. You won't get that sort of rate with a newspaper. You're looking at a targeted site with a pretty loyal following. Their Alexa ranking is in the low 20,000's. Pretty strong. Google shows 424,000 links. Is he a genius? Maybe. But he's definitely done a good job of getting the site out there and attracting a good following. The question for you is "How many units of whatever you're selling do you have to move in order to make this a good deal?" If you are selling something with a profit of $100 and advertising on this site can generate you 30 sales then you broke even. If you are selling something with a profit of $10, then you need to move 300 units to break even. It's all about the math with advertising. $XXX.00 in advertising needs to bring in at least $XXX.00 + $1 in profits (not sales) in order to be profitable.
The problem with paying so much upfront, many times you cannot get your money back if something goes wrong, or that webmaster doesn't do what he is supposed to be doing. I'm surprised to see a webmaster even do something like this, never mind advertisers willing to do it.
I'm not really up on what banner ads should cost, but I do know that advertising can be quite expensive.
yep this guy has done is home work i look at the site and it is pulling strong he get allot of traffic.
I saw a big Wendy's banner on the front of MySpace last week. I guarantee that cost them quite a bit more than the banners mentioned by the OP.
I was a moderator/semi-administrator at a very large electronic device forum for several years. At its peak of operation, the site was one of the largest around, an active membership on scale with DP, probably larger. Well, I know that a 1 month banner advertisement on that site cost around $600-1000 per month depending on the size of the banner and location. Header banners brought a premium and site sponsorship wasn't even discussed because all the owner of the site would say "It's a lot of dough!". At any given time there were many advertisers, and everyday, inquiries from people wanting to purchase a banner. Then one day, the site got shutdown .... the owner apparently didn't declare the "income" from the forum advertising on his tax returns and was "living beyond his determined means" ... I think that's how it was worded by the authorities who seized the site. So those rates are very reasonable, and with any amount of traffic, very obtainable. Look at a 3-day newspaper advertisement ... here in our local paper with about 25,000 subscribers to our local rag, it's $250 for 3 days.
2 million posts and about 500 users on at all times. Not bad, is it worth that much? No, but as said above they always highball you on the first contact. Try to negotiate a better rate and get traffic stats out of them.
I think its reasonable, I know a blogger who has some 15000 readers charges 3K/month for a small banner spot. Its highly targetted quality niche. I think if you get a good position, you can bank alot.
I agree with Christian Little about getting traffic stats for the site. I just found out the quantcast stats for the daily traffic: http://www.quantcast.com/6speedonline.com/traffic You are getting about 300,000 page views/impressions per month from US visitors or about 3.6 million impressions/year. At $25,000/year for the grand sponsorship that equals a CPM of $0.7.