we are debating whether to use ads on our web based messenger service, i wanted to get some feedback from the forum whether it would be worth while or a good idea to do so. The site name is www.koolim.com its a web based messenger service which enables you to log in to many IM services directly from the web using AJAX (a LOT of work to make it happen). The site has been around for almost 3 months, actually the 10th of october will make it 3 months we get close to 20,000 unique a day and around 26,000 page views, the page views are low because its an ajax application and there is not much refreshing. We run a platform service, www.buddystream.com which makes our monthly income and review, the debate is whether to monetize our other project which is koolim.com with ads. We want to know if it is done well, what would be the return? half the users are USA based and the others are scattered around the globe, each user stays on the site close to an hour on average. any feedback would be greatly appreciated and helpful. also, this is an excellent forum, someone told me to have a look, you wont believe it, but in the last three nights, i have spend close to 30 hours browsing the forums, very interesting and wonderful. -Samer
That is a great idea, and it looks really nice. Good job! I can see a lot of school kids finding it useful (no msn/messenger progs at school). I'm no expert, but I would go for CPM ads, ie you get paid by impression, not by click. Keep it up, that is a really nice looking site.
thank you, we plan on making it much more competitive, the unique visitor numbers are always climbing, we have a major update soon which we believe will double unique hits to anywhere between 40-60k. -Samer
I'd sell text links and put CPM on as well. also can you tell us more about this im service. did you pay for advertising ? does it use much server load ? etc. thanks !
use, we build the server, it has 3 servers now, we usually at peak tiomes have around 1250 people logged on. service is still in alpha, needs a bit more time to really get it going. we did all kinds of marketing, press releases, blog writers, etc. no adwords yet.
Great site! If I were you I would put CPM ads on to your site from fastclick and linkbuddies. For linkbuddies I would set it to 50/50 so you get half of the impressions you serve as money and the other half as traffic (impressions). You would still get plenty of money from the fastclick ads though. I would try and put the CPM ads in the part of the site that does refresh somehow (if I were you). Is this possible?