Advertising

Abacci > Bazaar > Webmasters> Advertising

Putting paid advertising on a website is the beginning of the slippery revenue generating slope for many web masters. For me it began with a web site I built that offered free eBook downloads alongside amazon.com reviews. Abacci Books became a very popular site, but didn't generate enough affiliate income to cover its bandwidth costs. To pay its way I added some popunder ad code and it's never looked back since.

I tried a couple of networks, but the main one I use is fastclick.com - their interface and setup options are far and away the easiest to use and most flexible. At fastclick you choose which types of ad to display, which company's to display ads for, and can include code for non-fastclick customer ads as well.

There are four main advertising types available: banners, skyscrapers, popunders and invue. Here's my take on them...

Banner Ads - generally I avoid these because they uglify the page too much for my taste. All too often they're flashing gifs which most folks have developed a cerebral filter for anyway. The few times I've run them I was disappointed with both the click through rate (indicating that my site's visitors didn't look at them) and the return (the lowest payment per 1000 views of all 4 categories, typically in the tens of cents per thousand).

Skyscrapers - these are tall columnar adds like the one you can see on the left. They don't get much more of a clickthrough rate than the banners, but you can get more information on them, and they can be put places that aren't so in-your-face as the banners. I use them only for the google listings. The other ads you see are default options which display when finclicks decides not to show a paid skyscraper - I've set it up on my fastclick account to show some skyscraper ads from my affiliations. Skyscrapers don't pay much per 1000, but it's a little more than banner ads and the clickthrough rate is higher, so I'll put them in if they suit my page design.
STOP PRESS - in June there was a revolution in skyscraper web site monetization -- Google's AdSense, a painless way to quickly add value to your site (for you and your visitors :-). Sitesell have put together a good section on running Google AdSense which covers all the facts, to gain access open this page - skip to the bottom of the page and find the link which reads something like 'Google's AdSense... A Tailor-Made Way to Monetize Your SBI! Site!' and you're on your way.

Popunders - these are the current bread and butter ads of the industry. Their conversion rate is significantly higher than any other ad type because they load in the background as you're viewing the page your visitor was after, displaying only after they leave the site. This means the ad can download more interactive material and is not displayed until after the viewer has finished the business at hand. They also appear in a seperate browser window, which distances them somewhat from your web site. Typically they pay around $3 - $5 per 1000 impressions, which easily covers my hosting costs plus a little extra. Some folks find these ads intrusively annoying, so you may want to exercise some caution if you're trying to build a respected web brand. On the sites where I employ them, I see popunders as the price of admission, if it wasn't for the ad generating revenue I just couldn't afford to give away a lot of the stuff I do.

InVue - like the popunder, these ads also spawn a new browser window, but rather than wait patiently in the background they jump right up over your current session, demanding attention from the viewer before they can get on with what they came for. I think this is a particularly stupid way of advertising something and never run these ads, though they do offer returns of $2 - $3 per 1000 impressions.