
Ask HN: How would you do first-party ads on your site? - hmhrex
I’m currently running RoutineHub which is getting around 5k unique visits and 17k total visits a day. I would love to earn money on these visits via advertising, but can’t bring myself to put a third-party ad network on my site. I’ve experimented with working with iOS developers to advertise their apps, but haven’t been able to keep them coming back. My average CTR is around 1.75%, so I feel like add value.<p>Are there specific communities where I can find advertisers? Are there more ethical ad networks that don’t scrape data from visitors to my site?
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reilly3000
For programmatic ads you should be happy to earn $6 eCPM with 6+ ads on the
page, so about $3180/mo. With that you would want to be prepared for seasonal
changes, like great earnings in the 4th quarter, then rates falling in half in
January.

I admire your effort to avoid tracking. Most traditional sources of ad spend
are somewhat incompatible with that model, so I wouldn't waste time worrying
about ad networks and agencies. Try to discover the organizations that would
gain the most value from exposure on your site, then sell them fixed
placements with annual contracts. You can also sell bundles of impressions,
but honestly its not likely that you could do so with much scale based on
self-reported impressions. That is to say, advertisers have no reason to trust
publisher metrics; they only trust trackers they can control or audit. Bot
traffic, from 3rd parties to your own testing/RUM tools, make impression
counts almost irrelevant, even if you are acting 100% in good faith.

Ideally, with fixed fee ad contracts you'll have advertisers you and your
audience generally likes, and those advertisers have some motivation to
support your community and showcase their sponsorship of it, since more
traffic for you means more value for them.

Your advertising page would do well to contain a web form, and not put all of
the terms up front. You can be very candid with your potential ad customers,
but there is no reason to scare them off on your landing page. Maybe a
separate URL for the ad terms?

In this context, I think referring to the program as a sponsorship vs
advertising makes sense. Ad buyers have not been keen on doing individual site
ad deals since the early 2000's, but there is always money for sponsorships-
with less expectations of metrics and more warm and fuzzy feelings.

I wouldn't expect you'd receive a lot of traffic from inbound traffic. Your
users would make for a good source of insight about who might make a good
sponsor, and may become a sponsor themselves.

If you depend on ad revenue, you're either in the business of programmatic
ads, or your in the relationship business. If that don't come naturally to
you, find somebody with existing relationships with check-writers and pay them
something like 25% of sales.

I like your site. I would suggest looking into your analytics for ideas about
potential sponsorship partners- at first blush (thanks you your awesome public
analytics) it looks like productivity, development, and music are decently
popular categories. Based on that Todoist, Zapier, & Spotify could be good
sponsors, or maybe startups in those categories that align with your values.

Best of luck!

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hmhrex
Wow. Thank you for all this information. It will be really helpful.

You mentioned finding someone who already has connections. Where might I find
those kinds of people?

Thank you again for taking a look at the site and giving great advice.

~~~
reilly3000
I wish I was in touch with people in that space, I used to be at one point. I
would say anybody who has worked in ad sales, or an outsourced media
sales/publisher representative. I'm not familiar with this firm, but something
along these lines:
[http://www.jamesgelliott.com/](http://www.jamesgelliott.com/)

~~~
hmhrex
Thanks again. I'll be honest, I was feeling like maybe it's just not possible
in this day and age to run non-third party ads. The info you've provided has
helped me out of that rut.

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ArtWomb
This is a really good topic ;)

1\. There is nothing stopping you from cold calling ad buyers and selling
banner or full page mobile ads directly. It's a lot of work, lots of hustle.
But the advantage is that you can microtarget to specific industries you think
your users (whom you know best) will be interested in. And you learn A LOT of
domain knowledge in the process.

2\. Self serve text ads. I believe there's an open library for implementation
on the web. But rolling your own shouldn't be onerous. Drop dead simple
pricing model. Simple content moderation. And you can provide a single
analytics page to buyers. They will handle their own click through analysis
via embedded URL.

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latest-release
You have lots of visitors that's impressive you should no doubt monetize them.
Probably I can guess you have fear for ad-blockers, that's okay I had them
also. But I did bypass ad blockers with a few simple tweaks. when you check my
site here [https://www.nmmapper.com](https://www.nmmapper.com) that pages you
visit even thought you have ad-blocker you will still see my ads from my
advertiser.

and I did even write a post about it here
[https://www.nmmapper.com/blog/2019/05/04/bypassing-all-
adblo...](https://www.nmmapper.com/blog/2019/05/04/bypassing-all-adblockers-
using-nginx-reverse-proxy/).

The original article was here show how to track adblocker users. But I moved
that knowledge to bypassing adblockers and show ads.
[https://gist.github.com/paivaric/211ca15afd48c5686226f5f7475...](https://gist.github.com/paivaric/211ca15afd48c5686226f5f747539e8b)

~~~
hmhrex
I have no fear of ad-blockers. In fact what you’re doing is exactly what I’m
against. Give people their privacy when they ask for it.

