

Ask HN: Direct advertising experience? - endlessvoid94

I have a site that generates around 500,000 impressions monthly (and growing).  I'm interested in getting away from Adsense, but I don't know how much to charge for ad space.  There are alot of blog articles about this, but I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience, advice, or tips for me.<p>My site is extremely targeted: http://www.ThatHigh.com<p>Some stats:<p>May 2010: 300,000 page views<p>June 2010: 600,000 page views<p>July 2010: 400,000 page views (so far)<p>Always about 4 pages per visit with a very long length of visit (anywhere from 2 to 15 minutes).<p>Thanks for your help.  Email me at dave@thathigh.com if you have any questions or private inquiries :-)<p>EDIT: Do I need to be incorporated to accept money from direct advertisers?
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bdickason
Disclaimer: I'm going to speak about 'premium' ad sales. That means more or
less fortune 500+ companies. This is my area of expertise so I won't speak to
other types of sales.

I work for an ad network and have seen sites around your size flounder trying
to do direct sales. Granted, there are a few (ala 100layercake.com) that are
extremely focused on a very profitable genre (in their case: weddings).
However, you're much better off bridging the gap in the short term.

Sign up for an ad network.

Figure out what your audience is like. How old? Male/female? Tech savvy?

Then go out and find a 'premium' network to fit your demo. For example, I work
for Giantrealm.com and we serve 12-34 yr old males (our sweet spot is 18-34).
We focus on Gaming/Entertainment/Lifestyle. Your blog would be a ... lifestyle
blog I guess? If you're struggling with categorization, try thinking how you
would be described by TV Guide. Lame, I know.

I've seen tons of sites try to get off google and go straight to direct sales.
99% of the time they fail because they aren't big enough to be on advertisers'
radar.

Google CPM's (cost per thousand ad impressions): About $1.00 on a good day.

'Remnant' CPM's: $1.50-2.00

'Premium' CPM's: $4.00-12.00 depending on the unit and setup.

note: these prices are AFTER the standard 50/50 split with your ad network.

Although direct sales will make you more money in the long term, you have a
number of items going against you by selling direct:

First and foremost, most advertisers won't blink an eye unless you're over
1,000,000 US unique visitors (the unit most advertisers think in). You can
check this by looking at the separate box called 'Unique Visitors' on the
Google Analytics dashboard and then segmenting by US.

Second: Advertisers usually work with an ad agency who takes care of most of
the buying. Ad agencies are usually staffed by 'junior' account execs which
are 20-24 yr old females (sorry to stereotype) that generally don't browse the
internet beyond Facebook. They usually have no idea that your site exists and
like to buy things they understand. They definitely don't understand your
site. They don't understand most of our sites. It's the problem we face with
'niche' content that doesn't focus around Twilight video reviews and Lindsay
Lohan paparazzi shots.

Third: Ad Agencies rely on an antiquated tool called Comscore. Comscore is
like a database of nearly every site online and how big they are.
Unfortunately, they rely mostly (this is changing nowadays) on panel-based
metrics, which means that they call people on the phone, ask them if they
would like to take an 'internet survey,' and then have them install a plugin
on their machine to do so. You can imagine that most of your viewers probably
won't be up for this. Most of our sites show up at 1/10th of their size on
comscore. For example Gameriot.com, a site I worked on for a year, showed 800k
unique visitors in Google Analytics. It showed up as 30k, 80k, 450k, then
didn't show up. These are 4 consecutive months. I would try to find a friend
to see if you show up.

Fourth: Advertising is alot of work. If you want to enter the true 'ad
industry, you need to get used to what are called RFP cycles. Advertisers send
out things called 'RFP's (Requests for Proposals) every few weeks that require
you to do a TON of work (build a powerpoint deck that sums up your 'pitch')
and fill out an excel spreadsheet in terms of 'media dollars' which is a
convoluted way of saying "convert all dollars into banners, break it out by
page, then give me a bunch of free stuff because I'm an advertiser and
everyone else does."

Fifth: Advertising is all about connections. There's a reason that most sales
people are given salaries that are directly based on their number of contacts.
If you don't know anyone, you're going to have a hard time getting meetings.
There are rumors about people buying football tickets, strippers, etc... No
comment.

Ad Networks will go out and sell your site 'directly' (good ones at least) and
pitch custom plans that your audience wil be excited about. Granted, sometimes
they sell a load of shit and everybody hates it, but the best sales people
sell campaigns that the site loves so users write positively about the brand.

The Ad Network model is to 'rep' a site 50/50 until the site becomes big
enough (traffic-wise) to sell direct. At that point, they will offer you large
sums of money NOT to sell direct :)

You'll also have a great idea of what sells on your site, what ads do well
(use their campaign monitoring tools to see which advertisers keep buying you
and what the click through rates are), so you'll be educated once you do start
buying direct :)

Finally, if read all that and REALLY don't want to sign up for an ad network,
you might try signing up for Google Ad Manager (Google's free ad server) and
dabbling in ad exchanges. They use real-time engines to allow advertisers to
bid against each other on your inventory. You can see rates of $2-6 this way
if your site is popular.

If you have any questions about what ad units you should run (728x90,
300x250), how you should pitch your site, how ad servers work, or which ad
networks to reach out to, I'm happy to help. E-mail is in my profile.

~~~
endlessvoid94
This was fantastic. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.

~~~
bdickason
endlessvoid94 just asked about which ad network he should choose. I'm cross-
posting my e-mail here so others can hopefully make a good decision:

I'm not really sure how to estimate how much you can make. I don't work on
that side of the business (I build products like video players and ad units
that help people monetize their content more effectively) but I can tell you
that unless you break out of 'traditional' units (ala start serving skins,
interstitialls, pre-roll, etc), you won't make a decent living until you reach
2 million+ pageviews. Even at that point, you'll be looking at around $2-3k
monthly revenue for a normal site.

I would suggest you start looking at the following providers: AdMeld - Will
optimize your 'remnant' ads by signing you up for a FUCKTON of remnant
providers (like Google, just different). This can lead to some short term
revenue gain (your $20-30/day will probably be pushed to $40-50/day).

Google Ad Exchange - I haven't signed up for this in forever but I think the
easiest way is to sign up for Google Ad Manager. Premium advertisers use whats
called a 'small order system' (Like AdWords if you've used it) to buy on your
site. If a few advertisers like you, they'll continue to buy. There's a ton of
logic that goes into optimizing your inventory (example: you can adjust the
minimum 'bid' you will accept until it's very low like $0.10 and a bunch of
people agree to buy your inventory then you can jack up your floor to $3.00
and see if anyone forgets to change their 'bids.') and I used to work with the
guys who run Pubgears.com which is a great resource. One of the founders is
also a huge marijuana fan so that might help you :)

Federated Media / Brash / IGN / Crave Online / UGO / GorillaNation / Break -
These guys are all our competitors. They hit 18-34 yr olds, just like your
site, and focus on men. Talk to all of them. The one you choose should be
based on your experience with the 'publisher support' (each company calls them
something different) person you speak with. Generally it's hit or miss. Some
of them are assholes, some of them are flighty. Get one that seems friendly
and responds VERY quickly to e-mails. Some networks care about you and will
talk to you on a daily/weekly basis to see what's going on with your site and
if you have any cool promotions, events, etc coming up. Other networks will
just ignore you once you sign up and that's the last thing you want to happen.

Collective Media / Burst / I-could-name-a-thousand-more - These are 'Blind'
networks. So-called because they usually avoid site-specific buys. Instead
they focus on selling a 'vertical' or a 'channel' like "Guys" as opposed to
individual sites.They don't require their ad tags to be the first on your site
so you can just throw them into your remnant chain ahead of google. If they
serve you a premium ad, you'll see $2-3. If not, they'll just default to
google anyway.

Also as an alternative... people were talking about selling stuff. Here's a
company I'm working with for my side venture that might be cool: OpenSky -
These guys hook up influential bloggers/sites with product manufacturers. For
example lets say someone has a hemp necklace (apologies for the lame example)
that they want to sell to people. Your site might be a good fit for that, so
they'd introduce you and send you a free necklace. If you dig it, you make a
couple posts about them and they give you some simple .js to place on your
site which renders an e-commerce store selling the necklaces. You keep a
split, the seller gets a split, and Opensky gets a split (known in advertising
as a 'three way split).

~~~
vesp
Wow, I'm speechless about your contribution! Thank you very much!

I'm the founder of VisualizeUs (<http://visualizeus.com>), a social
bookmarking site for images, and we're in the same situation as endlessvoid94,
so the information in your posts is extremely valuable. Right now we aren't
monetizing all our traffic properly (900K unique visitors last month, 10M
pageviews last month, 51% of the traffic is from US, and you'd laughed about
the total revenues!). We have adsense and direct sale to small sponsors, but
without any special work on selling the spots (two people just to run all the
site).

We're looking for an ad network to monetize our traffic. As you can see our
public is creative young people that loves pictures and visual culture, and
thus not any graphical ad could fit on there. In fact, to prove that point,
the two sponsors we have right now on the small spots, they have a huuge
difference on clicks just because of the creativity and theme.

We've just applied to IndieClick, and I'll explore some of the options you
mention in your post, including the adnetwork you're working at, as I think it
fits into our public ;) I'd appreciate any tip or special suggestion from you,
as your opinion is very valuable! Truth is, as a hacker, I'm so new to all
this ad world, and feel kind of lost sometimes ;)

Also I'm open to share any info that can be helpful of course!

~~~
bdickason
I have a friend that just left Indieclick. E-mail me (on my profile) if you
want to speak with him for opinions :)

I would suggest trying to get signed by Federated Media. They're the leaders.

------
aresant
Here's a thought, build a few products to sell yourself.

You have a super specific audience, one that skews to the younger end I
imagine.

I bet some good t-shirts with short / popular slogans would do well, probably
posters too.

A few years back CollegeHumor was selling $18.00 t-shirts at a 30,000/MONTH
clip:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/3/collegehumor-guys-
secr...](http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/3/collegehumor-guys-secret-
success-t-shirts)

T-shirts, posters, etc are all extremely easy to fulfill via 3rd party and
move internally when the model is proven.

If that sounds appealing start with a simple survey to try and figure out what
your audience would be interested in.

~~~
endlessvoid94
This is a great idea, but I'm unclear of the particulars on how to pursue it.
I don't have very much money, and I can't afford (currently) to just order 500
tshirts and spend 1000 bucks on it.

Are you suggesting something like Cafepress? I'm terrible at graphic design
and not sure what to put on the tshirts other than a logo...

~~~
aresant
In my experience <http://www.zazzle.com/> or <http://www.cafepress.com> are
the best.

Since you have the traffic, and you're a hacker and can set this up, I'd
suggest that you run a T-Shirt contest.

Pay $100.00 for the top design and promise to promote the designer from your
home page - let your audience vote on it.

Prior example: Shoemoney is a master at getting people to design all his stuff
for free eg:

[http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/05/29/design-my-new-
business-c...](http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/05/29/design-my-new-business-
card-win-free-business-cards-for-life/)

Good examples of sites doing this:

<http://store.theonion.com/category/mens-tees-hoodies,4/big/>

<http://www.bustedtees.com/>

Even CNN played around with this model:

<http://www.cnn.com/tshirt/#headlines/allshirts/2010/6/1>

I actually think the CNN-type model could work well for you - let people pick
their favorite saying, make the contest about building a template / format for
the t-shirt

------
DJN
Checkout this post in our series on How to Sell Ads Online.

[http://www.trafficspaces.com/blog/2010/01/13/how-to-sell-
ads...](http://www.trafficspaces.com/blog/2010/01/13/how-to-sell-ads-online-
let-the-market-determine-the-price-via-an-auction/)

It talks about setting up an auction instead of a fixed price. It is an
efficient way to find the market price for your ad space.

