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As you may have noticed for the
last year or so I have been using advertising on the site to
see how good internet advertising is at making income for website
owners. One often hears, or sees, claims on the internet that serious money is being made by website owners simply by allowing advertising companies to place a few links, or inventory as they call it, on your site.
I started with Google's Adsense but I was uncomfortable with the
whole experience as adsense seems to be designed on the basis of taking
visitors away from your site rather than complimenting your site
and your visitors experience. In money terms I made enough for 2 cups of coffee a
month and then, to my surprise Google just banned me. Turns out I
had clicked on one of my own adverts, I must have been thirsting
for a third cup of coffee! Anyway 2 cups of coffee a month was not
enough for me to warrant an argument over. I packed my proverbial publishers
bags and headed over to a competitor, Adbrite.
I have been using Adbrite for both listings and banners for quite while. I
did try their interstitial method that would put up an advertisers
website to each of my visitors after their 3rd click on my site but I found that it
was annoying the hell out of me so I presumed it was actually bad
for web traffic and visitors experience rather then beneficial so I
stopped using Adbrite Interstitials. I am currently running Adbrite
for banners and text ads but to be honest my traffic level is just
over 100,000 hits per month so the result is an income that would
pay for one cup of coffee a month. Ah, I look back longingly at those heady days of 2 cups a month with Google.
My usage of Adbrite has been nearly caffeine free free but the problems
have not really been Adbrite's but my own. My site does 100,000+
hits a month on 2000 unique vistors and this is not enough traffic to make
Adbrite pay well for a publisher. Adbrite protect their advertisers
(and rightly so!) so as long as you are selling direct text ads you
are OK, but with CPM and CPC the ad does not show up
every time a page loads so say you have an CPM running at $2.00 per
thousand, then you would think the payout would be 100,000/1000 =
100 therefore $2.00 x 100 = $200 BUT in reality the ad is only
going to show a few times and you would be lucky to make a dollar
off those 100,000 pages served.
So I have decided to drop Adbrite and have
a try with Text Link Ads instead. The Text Ad Links system is
similar to Adbrite but the monthly price is higher (and more realistic
I think) and only advertisers who wish to specifically place an
advert on my site can, at a cost. I like this because it means any
ads can be kept very relevant to the sites visitors. Saying that I
don't expect many ads to be forthcoming (hopefully 2 or 3 a year), but lets see.
I have now also started to trial affiliate marketing on the site.
My first venture was with Amazon but I have decided to go a very
unobtrusive route and use CJ (commission junction) and
Kolimbo. This allows me post banners and links on the site
that compliment the users experience and do not take way from the
site. I get paid nothing if you follow one these links or click on
one of the banners. But if you decide to purchase from the site
within 30 days (normally) and the computer memory gods shine in my
favor I get a miniscule percentage of your purchase price
(normally 1% to 3%). So in essence, its paying for leads if the
lead results in sale. That's not good odds for website owners but
a) I think it fits in with my morals more and b) I have not been
making any money through CPC and CPM advertising to speak of.
So what is my conclusion with web based advertising and publishing
so far. Well you really need a lot more traffic that I am
generating. 2000 unique visitors a month (or 70 a day) is not enough to
even bother with CPC or CPM. Additionally I think cost per click,
cost per impression and cost per thousand are really detracting
from the visitors experience IMHO as the ads are largely irrelevant
to the subject of the site and also the income generated is
laughably small.
So lets see how the future goes - I will keep you posted.
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