Struggling to get my monetisation right for my growing forum

Discussion in 'Pay Per Click Advertising' started by Deadmanscrosszone, Mar 6, 2014.

  1. #1
    Hey Guys.

    Excellent forum by the way. I've been a guest here for about a year and learnt a lot. The main thing being that one only gains success on the web with hard hard hard work and don't I know that.

    I created my community some 6 months ago and have been building is slowly and doing regular SEO. - deadmanscrosszone.com

    After some 500 or so hours admin, quite a few $$$ and a good team behind me we now have some success.

    Rough stats are as follows:

    5000-10000 Daily Unique Visits
    1,000,000 Daily Page Views
    250,000 - 500,000 daily impressions dependent on how many ad blocks i'm running.

    A lot of this is new to me and i'm now struggling to work out the best way forward with my ads.

    Adsense banned us and we are in the middle of an appeal.

    My guess is that following a sudden increase of traffic overnight (like 10,000% growth overnight) we got banned by adsense. The reason the traffic increased all of a sudden is that the IOS game that my site is based around was officially released and traffic went through the roof as people searched for a forum to support the game.

    Now. My problems lie with getting the right ad networks in place.

    Many of the bigger ones have presently declined us as independent metrics have not caught up with site traffic yet.

    We use a number of other networks chitika (waiting for gold approval), switchads, Q1Media, Qadabra

    I have tried about another 5-10 ad networks too that we're not suitable.

    At the moment we are making about $12 per day in total and am finding CPM's low in many cases, many are $0.01 - $0.05. One of them is paying about $0.25 but only at about 15% fill rate.

    I have spent hours on this forum trying to see what i'm doing wrong as from what i've read the site should be getting a better return that this.

    Any ideas would be appreciated.

    Thanks

    Chris
    DCZ
     
    Deadmanscrosszone, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  2. Aquarezz

    Aquarezz Notable Member

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    #2
    You should have gotten an e-mail from Adsense explaining the reason, no?

    Have you done direct advertising? Contact other websites that may be interested in your visitors. Selling directly has always brought in most money for me (except for high paying niches like insurances).
     
    Aquarezz, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  3. Deadmanscrosszone

    Deadmanscrosszone Peon

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    #3
    No, I haven't gone about direct advertising. My understanding is that I would maybe put a "Ad space for sale" banner on the page and maybe wait for contact from someone who would to buy that space for x amount of days.

    My site is based within the video gaming niche but my best guess is that the big game developers probably won't stumble across the site and see the for sale banner.
     
    Deadmanscrosszone, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  4. bale

    bale Active Member

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    #4
    1 million pageviews a day with 10.000 visitors. You probably made a mistake. As for advertising networks, its very hard our days to get over 0.5CPMs. Try some popup/popunder banners or some kind of affiliate marketing
     
    bale, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  5. Deadmanscrosszone

    Deadmanscrosszone Peon

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    #5
    Thanks Bale. Due to the nature of the game the site is based around most visitors browse on average 100 pages giving rise to the high page view count.

    $0.50 CPM would be great. In fact i'd be happy with $0.30 but at the moment seem to get rates between 0.01 and 0.05 hence I am trying to get this to rise
     
    Deadmanscrosszone, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  6. aassociatehit

    aassociatehit Well-Known Member

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    #6
    since your website is blocked in adsense and they never unblock site again and appeal and all never works.
     
    aassociatehit, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  7. Annea

    Annea Well-Known Member

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    #7
    Someone else mentioned affiliate marketing, which could be very profitable for you. Check Clickbank, they have programs like gaming jobs online, that sort of thing.

    Also, you could try CPA marketing, put some banners on your site and earn that way.
     
    Annea, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  8. Deadmanscrosszone

    Deadmanscrosszone Peon

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    #8
    Thanks for the info. I'll look in to clickbank
     
    Deadmanscrosszone, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  9. dcristo

    dcristo Illustrious Member

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    #9
    Forums are renowned for being hard to monetize. Based on past forums I ran I made the most from direct ad sales.
     
    dcristo, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  10. NeilPearson

    NeilPearson Well-Known Member

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    #10
    Have you tried Lijit ?
     
    NeilPearson, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  11. Deadmanscrosszone

    Deadmanscrosszone Peon

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    #11
    Not yet, but i've signed up. So they will be a worthwhile test
     
    Deadmanscrosszone, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  12. langau

    langau Member

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    #12
    you should try Adversal + Qadabra + Cpmors
     
    langau, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  13. aassociatehit

    aassociatehit Well-Known Member

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    #13
    Already mentioned used some of the suggested network, I think if you are not against adding pop specially smaller size windows like edomz offers now you will earn much more than what you may earn in cpm, specially network like chitika, Qadabra offers very poor cpm rate.

     
    aassociatehit, Mar 6, 2014 IP
  14. bizacquire

    bizacquire Active Member

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    #14
    you sure with your traffic?
    because you have still high alexa
     
    bizacquire, Mar 12, 2014 IP
  15. Ant0ni

    Ant0ni Active Member

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    #15
    Hey there, you have very good user statistics. Do you know user's Geo's? As CPM network you can try "Fidelity Media". You also can make money from you app by putting small banners there.
     
    Ant0ni, Mar 12, 2014 IP