

Advice for startups on how to make money from online advertising - mindball
http://www.techvibes.com/blog/advice-for-startups-on-how-to-make-money-from-online-advertising-2011-04-13

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qeorge
If you're doing direct sales, I recommend leading with your unique visitor and
subscriber counts rather than pageviews. Unless you're seeing > 70,000
pageviews a month you're unlikely to get the attention of Tribal Fusion or
similar networks.

Then you can say "My site reaches 10,000 {doctors, practice managers,
programmers} a month. Buy an ad, and they'll all see it sometime."

To this end, one of my clients of mine sells 120x240 spots in her sidebar for
$250/month, and sells them out consistently (3 spots). All sites are
different, but perhaps that can be useful as a starting point.

Another good tip I learned from a client, for finding advertisers: go to all
your competitors sites/magazines/etc, and see who is advertising. Then call
those advertisers on the phone. These folks are already geared to do media
buys, see the value in it, etc. Should be relatively easy to get them to try
you out too.

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forgot_password
I'm no expert, but I bet few publishers command $12 CPMs. That seems
outrageously high.

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wensing
$10 CPM is at the bottom of the rate card for publishers like newspaper
websites, etc. When we were doing advertising for Stormpulse we were making
$5-12 CPM off direct sales and $2-3 CPM off ad networks. We knew the direct
sales prices were actually selling ourselves short.

~~~
mckoss
Residual rates sold through Google AdSense are frequently below $0.50 CPM.

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_delirium
It depends a lot on the area. I run a moderate-traffic finance-related site
that gets about $20 CPM via AdSense. (Before the financial crisis put an end
to the glut of mortgage-related ads, it used to be more like $40.)

On the other hand, I run a music-related site that gets something like $0.25
CPM.

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TheRunningStart
It really does depend on how niche your content is and how much demand there
is for your site and for that type of content. Finance and automotive websites
tend to get higher CPMs - especially for peak seasonal promotions like RSP/Tax
season and auto shows, etc. When you're starting out, you will likely get much
lower CPMs but as demand increases and your avails start to sell out, then you
can ask for higher CPMs. Again, it may vary based on more popular areas of
your website, time of year and demand.

