I am thinking of starting an Ad network similar to adbrite, adsense etc where you have pubishers and advertisers. The problem I see starting off is having ad inventory in place that attracts publishers from get go. Does anyone have any tips or ideas on how to approach starting an Ad network, getting advertisers in order to give the first few pubishers something to dispay and earn money off. As its a chicken and egg situation in publishers need the enticement of revenue whilst advertisers need display otherwise they wont invest time/money in joining the Ad Network.
Well its pritty easy to get advertisers, just offer better pay than adsence, and use some of your own sites to start, and then once you have x amount of advertsers aproach a internet advertising firm and tell then you have xxxx sites who they can advertise on for low fees, once you have them hooked then you can up the prices to the ad firms you can also not have such a strict banned content types, like adbrite but with the pays of adsence.. that would be popular, what i mean is lke adsence says you must have content on the page and no ads on proxified pages where as adbrite allows ads on proxified pages so it would be good to have a better paying alternative.
Good thought. There aren't too many good options. Either you have a lot of contacts in the industry, or a stellar sales pitch and a lot of time, or a fairly large amount of money. The best option is working on an ad exchange, similar to Right Media, or AdECN. This will eliminate any liquidity problems that cause this chicken/egg situation, as you called it. When you have excess inventory that your publishers can't fill, you can automatically send it to be filled by other networks on the exchange, pleasing your advertisers. When you don't have enough inventory in a particular category, you can pull ads from the exchange to cover the gap. I went over that a little better in the following thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1519774 If you want to do this seriously from scratch, you'll need capital of mid 5-figures, but you can buy an established network that's profitable for high 4 figs, low 5 figs. PM me if you want the info. It barely takes any of your time to operate and has a great turnaround. With that investment, you'll get access to a more profitable tier of clients, better servers and less management time all around. On the other hand, if you only have a few hundred $ to work with, there are more profitable and less stressful ventures. You'll have to deal with downtime, security issues, support and marketing, and you won't be able to afford the relatively cheap solutions that would have allowed you to eliminate those problems and increase profits at an exponetial ratio /lower time spent on the network. What it boils down to: if you have a decent sized investment at the start, your profits will be larger at a level that is higher than proportion, and you'll be able to spend less time on grunt work
For beginning,you can start off by offering free coupon to hosting company to ask them distribute to their client as what is done by adwords.
As with all things, create fake accounts. Fake publishers, fake advertisers. Publishers would start to believe there really are advertisers, so it must be worth their while and they would spread the word around. This way you would get more publishers. Newly incoming Advertisiers will believe they are getting page views when in fact they are all from fake publishers. Buy some things from the advertisers using your own money using clickthroughs from random publisher sites. Advertisers will think they are getting ROI from their ad spendings. So they spend more and increase their budgets. Of course thiw will involve you will have to play tripartite role - the business owner of the ad network, the publisher as well as the advertiser.
in start ,you can start off by offering free coupon to hosting company to ask them distribute to their client as what is done by ad words.advertisers using your own money using clickthroughs from random publisher sites.