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The Case For Private Ad Sales
By Max | August 3, 2007
From my earnings last month, I saw that July CPM rates were not very good at Tribal Fusion. I think part of that has to do with a natural summer slow down in advertising spending. Much higher rates can be achieved with private ad sales. For one thing if you bypass the network, you’ll receive the full amount from the advertiser. Also by selling the ads yourself, you’ll likely find advertisers more suited to your niche who’ll pay more than the ad network rates because your traffic will convert better for them.
This all seems great at first, but you have to think about how much time it will take to find and then service an advertiser. With Tribal Fusion I just take their code and put it on the site. At that point the work is done which is great. If you sell the ad space yourself, you are going to have to spend a lot of time just to find an advertiser. Then on top of that you will need to negotiate a price, get them to pay you, and then place the ads on your site.
Say someone wants to pay you $100 for an ad placement that normally makes you $50 with Tribal Fusion or some other network. If you spend 3 hours of your time with all the details, then you have essentially just created a job for yourself making $17/hr. That isn’t too bad for just running a website, but my goal in owning sites is to minimize my time requirement as much as possible. Running a business will never be completely passive income, but the closer to that goal you get, the more time you’ll have to spend on a beach in Hawaii. 
Unless you can land a very big spender, the time it takes to do all of this is probably not worth the extra increase in income if you value your time at all. The ideal advertiser will continue to purchase your inventory for several months. The first month with a new advertiser will be the most time consuming. After that its all gravy. For smaller sites I would recommend that they just sit and wait for advertisers to come to them. That eliminates the time spent finding advertisers.
This month I really want to find some more direct advertisers. I believe I will really be able to boost my earnings beyond what Tribal Fusion can pay. I am however going to be watching how much time I spend with this endeavor to be sure that the time is well spent.
Topics: Earnings Optimization |
August 3rd, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Time is money. I have always heard that but I still waste it. I think though unless you are an “A” lister its probably better in the long run to us a service for selling ads.
Of course if someone comes knocking on your door then by all means see if you want to open it.
August 3rd, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Hey Max,
I will be looking to launch that site over the next week and looking at your other comments I will try to intergrate a cost per impression scheme, using some simple PHP code so they user doesnt have to update and using my site to host the ad’s that way I can be the middle man in making sure both parties are getting the right amount of impressions etc.
Would you be interested in a service like that??
I wouldn’t take me long to build once I get the spec’s finialised.
Thanks,
Mark
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Mark,
If you are talking about what I think you are talking about, it would be an excellent idea. Currently the banner/CPM networks take a pretty hefty cut out of the ad sales price not leaving much for the publisher. I think that starting a site to hook up publishers with advertisers is an excellent idea.
If there is a way for you to integrate with OpenAds that would be ideal since a lot of publishers use it.
Max
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Yeah I would look at charging for add-on features or ‘featured listings’. Everything else would be free, at least for the forseeable future.
Im looking into OpenAd’s too, that would probably be more of a version 2.0 release, but definately worth looking at….
I should have a beta going soon which you can poke around with if you wouldn’t mind? Cheers for all the feature suggestions, it makes developing so much easier.
Thanks,
Mark
August 4th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Max,
For a list of initial release features check out http://webmasterlinksales.com/
Signups are also up and working.
Thanks,
Mark