Website advertising
- Thread starter Beantown
- Start date
unluckyseventeen
Well-Known Member
Google Ads is the baseline, in the sense that they will put your ad anywhere, except maybe on a porn site, but you'll make the least money with them versus another advertiser. A decent Google Ad rate is probably $0.15 CPM (CPM meaning per 1000 page views/impressions).
You're going to make the most money by privatizing your ad rates and getting clients that will pay you directly to display their ads. If you have the means, that's the best route. You can charge a pretty high amount depending on what you can negotiate. Making $1.00 CPM would be a great return rate.
There are a lot of other advertisers that will pay a decent amount, but they usually expect you to be a very specialized site, in the sense that you have a very narrow market. I was signed up with a second advertiser a year or so ago when I ran a video game site that would use Google Ads as a backup, and they would fill the ads at about an 80% rate, for around 0.30 CPM per ad on the page (we had two). So, it was an okay rate.
Now, getting to a reasonable traffic flow, this is where you really need an insane amount of traffic to make your time worthwhile. If you're getting less than maybe 250,000 page views per day, you're not going to make very much money. So you really need to find an idea that is going to attract unique traffic on a regular basis without you putting much time into maintaining the site. And if you get to the point where your site is nothing but ads, people won't visit them and they'll quickly get a reputation of being ******** sites that don't seem to offer anything legitimate. And 250,000 page views per day is a crazy amount of traffic. If I had to guess, I'd say Jazzfanz turns in maybe 10,000 page views per day, and perhaps up to 50,000 during the peak times of the year. With google ads and a low conversion rate (forums don't lead to a lot of effective ad impressions), I'd guess their CPM is probably like $0.10 to $0.15. It seems like it's a lot, but I hear Jason has to pay a bit out of pocket to keep the site up, even after the earnings from ads. Which is why, I'm sure, he appreciates any donations.
When I was running the video games site, I think I made $50 in 4 months with about 950-2,000 page views per day, and I did a lot of work to get that site launched. Needless to say, it was down quickly. But, I did get a very good programming framework put together and it gave me enough experience to be a professional, contracted PHP developer, so it was actually a good thing. Not to mention, I learned a lot about trying to make money on the internet. There's plenty of potential, but I'd say only about the top 0.05% of web sites actually turn a reasonable profit. Don't get too fixated on numbers. If you find yourself thinking about numbers too much, it's a sign that you're not making much money and you should spend your time elsewhere.
You're going to make the most money by privatizing your ad rates and getting clients that will pay you directly to display their ads. If you have the means, that's the best route. You can charge a pretty high amount depending on what you can negotiate. Making $1.00 CPM would be a great return rate.
There are a lot of other advertisers that will pay a decent amount, but they usually expect you to be a very specialized site, in the sense that you have a very narrow market. I was signed up with a second advertiser a year or so ago when I ran a video game site that would use Google Ads as a backup, and they would fill the ads at about an 80% rate, for around 0.30 CPM per ad on the page (we had two). So, it was an okay rate.
Now, getting to a reasonable traffic flow, this is where you really need an insane amount of traffic to make your time worthwhile. If you're getting less than maybe 250,000 page views per day, you're not going to make very much money. So you really need to find an idea that is going to attract unique traffic on a regular basis without you putting much time into maintaining the site. And if you get to the point where your site is nothing but ads, people won't visit them and they'll quickly get a reputation of being ******** sites that don't seem to offer anything legitimate. And 250,000 page views per day is a crazy amount of traffic. If I had to guess, I'd say Jazzfanz turns in maybe 10,000 page views per day, and perhaps up to 50,000 during the peak times of the year. With google ads and a low conversion rate (forums don't lead to a lot of effective ad impressions), I'd guess their CPM is probably like $0.10 to $0.15. It seems like it's a lot, but I hear Jason has to pay a bit out of pocket to keep the site up, even after the earnings from ads. Which is why, I'm sure, he appreciates any donations.
When I was running the video games site, I think I made $50 in 4 months with about 950-2,000 page views per day, and I did a lot of work to get that site launched. Needless to say, it was down quickly. But, I did get a very good programming framework put together and it gave me enough experience to be a professional, contracted PHP developer, so it was actually a good thing. Not to mention, I learned a lot about trying to make money on the internet. There's plenty of potential, but I'd say only about the top 0.05% of web sites actually turn a reasonable profit. Don't get too fixated on numbers. If you find yourself thinking about numbers too much, it's a sign that you're not making much money and you should spend your time elsewhere.
Beantown
Well-Known Member
Thanks so much for the information. Much appreciated. I just wanna make sure I get this right. 250,000 CRM at 0.15 is only like 1100 dollars a month correct? Also CPM means page views? Does that mean everytime a person clicks on something? How many CRM should you get from each actual human visitor? Sorry for the questions, and thanks again.
Bean, unless I've misinterpreted what Unlucky wrote, 1 CPM = 1,000 pages views. Therefore, 250,000 CPM would be 2,500,000 page views (btw, what is CRM? is that a typo, or is it something else entirely?)
unluckyseventeen
Well-Known Member
CRM? I've never heard of that acronym before, and if I used it, my bad.
CPM is simply a way to say "cost per 1,000 page views". If you're getting $0.15 CPM, that means you need 1,000 page views to make $0.15. Fewer and fewer advertisers are running a CPC payment system, which is cost per click. A lot of advertisers did this during the first few years of the internet's popularity, and almost nobody does it now. Google actually does a weird combination of the two, to determine how much CPM you should be getting based on how many clicks they return.
A "page view" is simply every time you go to a new page on a site (or the going to the same page more than once), it's a page view. So if you hit refresh 20 times and let the page load every time, there's 20 page views. Same as if you went clicking around.. every new page you hit would be another page view. It seems like a lot, but it's really not. 250,000 page views in a month is a monstrous amount of traffic for a start-up site.
Anyway, if your site loads 250,000 pages per month, that's 250 units of payment if it's a CPM payment system (250,000 / 1,000), which most advertisers are. 250 units times $0.15 = $37.50. But, keep in mind that $0.15 is a pretty low rate. Most sites that have a few ads here or there that have good advertising contracts probably get up around $1.00 - $1.20 CPM. Sometimes more.. depends on site content and how effective the ads are going to be. But, even that rate of $1.00 or so with the page views I listed is still only $250/month. Not exactly big bucks considering most sites take a lot of administrative work, plus all of the hosting and software fees you likely will have to pay for.
Think of how popular a site like youtube is. Youtube easily loads into the billions of page views per month, with tons of room to spare. Last I heard, they still lose money on their site because of the cost in server space and bandwidth. That may have changed since Google took it over, though.
And to answer your other questions, it again depends on the type of site you run. Say you go on forums, you might load 35 pages per day as a fairly frequent user. But those page views aren't going to be very valuable to an advertiser because it's the same people seeing the same ads over and over.. the chances of them converting that into business is pretty low.
Hopefully that answers your questions.