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Ask HN: Advertising Rates

6 points by relix ↗ HN
Hey HN,

I've just been contacted by a person interested in putting advertisement on one of my sites. He asked about advertising options and rates.

I'm not incorporated and am running it myself as a side-project. For the moment I'm using AdSense and getting about €0.6 CPM, with about 500k pageviews a month. This is the first person to contact me about ads.

How do I continue? What rates should I start with, and will the fact that I'm not incorporated be a disadvantage here? Any other help? Thanks guys!

11 comments

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noodle
this is a side project, so don't overcomplicate this.

charge a lump sum for a length of time that will approximate the pageveiws at a rate you think is fair, but more than what you're making now (ex: €500/mo @ €1 CPM). if more people start asking or you start making more via adsense, you can start raising your rate. use the proceeds to incorporate.

relix
Thanks, great advice! I was focusing too much on CPM and rotating ads.

I am experiencing huge growth though (constant 30% a month for the last 7 months) so I should probably ask €600/month @ €1 CPM, or charge per week.

noodle
perhaps. if you sell by the month, you've locked someone into paying for the full month. if you sell by the week, someone might pay for a week and then quit.

depends on how much effort you're willing to put into ad sales/maintenance.

Ardit20
I personally would probably go higher than $1 per 1000 views, but then my CPM is higher than 0.6, but for $1 you can use adsdaq which allows you to set your own CPM price, but of course you would not get 100% fill up rate, but I would assume that even with a 30% fill up rate, if you can get ten pence more or 40 pence, it probably would be worth it.

I have no experience of such thing however, but I would at least try and ask for 1.2. You should remember that the 0.6 is through a middle man. And in any event the person would get back if they really want a deal and if they aren't really so keen then you hard loose much. So going for higher than you would be comfortable to settle with might be a good idea.

And congrats! 500k page views is quite an achievement!

relix
Thanks for linking me to Adsdaq, looks very interesting! Apparently I can set backuptags, so if I have less than 100% fill rate I can put AdSense back. I won't risk earning less because of this.

The advice on going a bit higher is great. It's typical negotiating stuff, so I'm guessing the person is expecting this.

Thanks very much! The site has experienced enormous growth and I've had to switch servers twice the last year. It's taken 3 years to get this far but it's finally at a point where some money is coming in instead of going out. To think I was about to abandon it because it was costing me too much.

noodle
i agree about the price in general, but i was kind of aiming towards giving him fast advice for his side project. i'm fairly confident he'll sell something to the single buyer at the $1CPM rate.

if he wants to rake in more customers and a higher rate, he'll have to put more time/effort into it, which he may or may not want to do.

relix
Good point, it's not like people are standing in line to put ads on my site.
adfu
What kind of advertisement are they asking for? Looking at your site, it looks like they want a display ad, right?

500K pageviews per month is quite a bit! How many unique users do you have?

I sell advertising space for a well known media company and we only have about 200K pageviews a month. Our lowest CPM is $5 and our highest is $15 depending on the demand for the particular page, position and any other special tweaks like geotargeting.

What I'm trying to say here is $1 is way too low.

Good luck!

relix
They didn't specify yet, but I'm guessing yes, they want to display an ad.

I have about 78K unique visitors.

It would be nice to be able to demand a higher CPM, but I don't have the experience to get that yet. I'll try putting Adsdaq on it, who knows, maybe I could get a $2 cpm there :)