2 replies to this topic

[amabaie]

I am wondering if there are any rules of thumb about what to charge for "branding" ad space on an information site geared at a specific target constituency?

Is there a rule of thumb, such as $0.01/visitor or $0.05/visitor? How would a website owner know whether to charge $20K or $200K per year?

The specific project I have in mind would likely have three sponsors for the interactive Web 2.0 site, with banners throughout the site. Ads would not be sold for traffic or rankings or even for sales, but strictly for branding.

Any leads, suggestions, links to good material that can help determine what typcial market value would be for something like this would be appreciated.

[MaKa]

Have you tried finding out what similar sites charge? One way to find this out is looking at the CPM (Cost Per 1000 impressions) of Google's site placement ads are in your industry. But even if you find that out you may want to charge more (or less) than what you find depending on your sites quality and results.

[Blogologist]

My own experience is that it all depends on the skills of the salesman.

Really!

I have seen a guy sell ads on a site that wasn't even live yet, at exorbitant prices, because he was a brilliant salesman and he personalized the sale really well.

It seems to me that if the vertical market in questions is full of "internet naive" potential advertisers, you can do really well. Conversely, the more internet savvy are your potential advertisers, the less you are likely to get out of them (since they know what the "going price" should roughly be).

The other sales skill I've seen is to turn a boring ad sale into a "partnership" or a "joint venture"... meaning that a good salesman can drill deeper into the opportunity and create something of much greater value for both parties than a mere ad sale.

None of this works at the scale of an "Adwords" operation, of course, where everything is streamlined and impersonal, but if you're selling advertising to a very specific market of potential advertisers, and you can prove your "stranglehold" of their target audience, and you have the control to tailor specific and different deals for different advertisers, then you can do a lot of good stuff.

Unfortunately it's really really hard to give out specific numbers, because invariably they don't apply, or may be disproven in your specific case.

-Alister