What does web advertising pay?

[IBM]

Okay, not sure if it's in the right section, but seemed like a good place to start.

I'm looking for some general information on the revenues generated by web advertising, specifically views or click throughs.

I know that pages with high hit rates can obviously charge for just banner ads, even if they don't result in clicks, but what kind of numbers are we talking, and what kind of prices are being charged.

I'm guessing that most of this info is fairly confidential, but if anyone can give me an indication, or links to help me start looking I'd be eternally* grateful.

*Eternally when used as a reference of time in conjunction with gratitude is not in actual fact eternal. Rather you could take it to mean a significantly shorter period of time. Let's say about six..no, four seconds. Yeah, four second. Thanks.

[Theo]

I'm by no means clued up on the subject, but Google's AdSense seems to be very popular and a common occurrence in websites small and large:

https://www.google.com/adsense/?hl=en_GB

[Norky]

You will never make any money with adsense, fact.

Standard advertising is generally charged per 10000 page impressions. I haven't looked at pricing in a while so unfortunately can't dig up any example prices (usually kept under wraps)

[Matt1eD]

ime it depends totally on what your site users are like and how popular your site is. Ads will send off users, however on a site like Hexus with a stable reputation it probably works, and more to the point you can sell advertising rather than have ads from other companies paying by sale leads, clicks, newsletter signups e.t.c.

I'm a fan of Tradedoubler.

[Twigman]

Yeah for anything small its going to be commission based.
And unless you are big/popular its really not worth the effort imo. It will not cover your hosting costs (probably)

[Mike Fishcake]

You're pretty much on the button actually. I've been experimenting with affiliate banner ads on my site this month. Just after I put the ads on my site, we got linked in a major newsletter, giving us over 67,000 ad banner hits (we have our own tracker installed) this month. (approx 44,000 of them are from articles, the rest from our forum).

Anyway, out of 67,000 ad views, we've had 52 clicks, leading to one sale, earning us £2.80 commission. Oh, and that was because I bought something However, I can only claim the commission once I reach £20 :-/

Admittedly on the main part of the site, we have only put one small banner right at the bottom of the page, so it doesn't jump out and attack your eyes, but we didn't want it to get in the way of the article itself. It probably would have got slightly more clickthroughs if there were more of them. It depends on how obtrusive you want the ads to be.

That's just my experiences, others may differ. Bear in mind we've hand picked these adverts from www.affiliatefuture.co.uk which does come recommended to me by a friend that works in marketing, so we've not just stuck any old crap on, but unless you're a huge site, you plaster loads of ads on your site and/or your site deals with a specialist audience, you're probably not going to make much. On the other side of the coin, the guy that runs the video forums site that's in my sig won't tell me exactly how much, but he reckons he makes enough money from ads to cover most of the hosting costs of his site, which gets over 3,000 unique visitors a day.

The problem is, more and more people are getting oblivious to adverts. At first, I found the automatic underlined ads (used on this site and tomshardware for example) really, really annoying, but (and I apologise to the hexus team) now I just shut them out and ignore them.

It's the sort of thing that might be worth looking into and experimenting with, because it doesn't cost anything to sign up, but don't expect miracles to happen unless you become a walking billboard

[IBM]

I've got an angle (hasn't everybody) which will guarantee a certain number of hits...like that crazy site a while back that paid you to watch adverts online...and the concept pretty much guarantees (as anything is guaranteed in online terms) a high number of page impressions. In addition, the ads can be targetted at very specific individual groups, lets say people looking for mobile phones.

If this was the case, and all true, could you see it making money? I'd really love to get an idea of what a click through is worth. 0.1 pence? 0.01 pence? Any ideas?

[Nick F]

I work in the same company that looks after whatcar.com advertising and can tell you they make a fortune every month from advertising. They don't do the whole p-p-c thing though. If you corner the right market you will have people emailing you to advertise.