

Ask HN: Dedicated advertising? - endlessvoid94

How does a site move from something like adsense into getting dedicated advertising clients like comedy central, specific vendors, networks, or companies?<p>How much do they pay?
======
apowell
The fact that Comedy Central is your first example of an ideal advertiser
means that you're probably not in a high-CPM niche. That's okay, but it means
you probably ought to be running a couple million impressions each month to
make direct sales realistic.

At lower volume (say, a 500k/mo+ impressions) you can investigate banner
networks like Valueclick, Casale, etc. If you go this route, hopefully you're
not turned off by flashing punch-the-monkey ads. It's not high-brow
advertising.

Also look into augmenting your income with the contextual link networks --
Infolinks, Kontera. It's decent supplemental income.

For a general-interest entertainment-type site without a high page churn (that
is, not a forum or social network), I'd aim for $2.50 overall page CPM. This
might require lots of ad units and creativity, but you can make that happen
without direct sales.

(Apologies if I've totally misread your niche -- in that case, hopefully all
this is useful to someone else.)

~~~
endlessvoid94
This is totally what I was looking for. thanks alot for your input :-)

------
dkasper
Think of getting direct advertising like any other business sale you will
make. You are selling the advertiser on the idea that getting their ads in
front of your traffic will be valuable to them. This involves either you
contacting them or if you are high profile enough them contacting you. There
are lots of blog posts out their with more detail on how to do this. After
doing this a lot you will probably start to see the value in a good ad network
in a new way :-)

The amount you will get can vary widely but CPMs can be very high $5-$10 is a
pretty good baseline, but it varies depending on a number of factors such as
how much traffic you get, how targeted and engaged the audience is, etc.

------
proexploit
If your site generate a relevant amount of traffic, you shouldn't have any
trouble finding advertisers (example: if you run a televisions comparison
website with a healthy readership, Samsung should come to you).

As far as payment, it's going to depend whether they're paying by the amount
of views their ad receives, the amount of clicks there ad gets, or the amount
of sales they receive (you could start affiliate advertising for large
companies today depending on the niche). The more info you can provide on your
users, and the more targeted they are, the more they are worth.

~~~
endlessvoid94
Thanks for your input.

Do you have any idea how much I should charge? My website is www.thathigh.com
and it's growing pretty constantly, sometimes exponentially. It's a fairly
niche website, but I've never negotiated with advertisers.

Should I offer $50 and work them down to $20? Or is that too many? (we're
talking eCPM here, i guess?) are there any other types of payments out there
(monthly for an ad or anything like that?)

thanks, i'm a complete newbie with advertising, i've been thrown into a really
good challenge and have alot to learn.

~~~
proexploit
Unfortunately, the "stoner" niche isn't known for having a lot of money (or at
least spending it online) so it can be harder to find advertisers for. In your
case, it would depend on the number of visitors you're receiving and where
they come from. Visitors from search tend to do well with adsense or similar
advertising. You may want to try buysellads.com or a similar service. Also
helpful could be reducing the number of ads on the right side, focusing on the
more relevant ones with hire payouts and present them as something more than
advertising. Write a blog, make it a sponsored post like
textsfromlastnight.com does, etc.

~~~
eliot_sykes
proexploit, exactly the information I've been looking for, I'm in a similar
situation, very timely, thank you.

Do you know of any other services like buysellads.com?

~~~
proexploit
text-link-ads.com might also be worth your time. All of the really great
advertising platforms are often niche specific or limited by some of your site
statistics so it's hard to give examples.

