Posts: 3
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan
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Pay per sale (e.g. Amazon.com) gets me just a few dollars a month on average. The two real choices are pay per impression (CPM) and pay per click (CPC). Of course, even these generate only small amounts of money, so don't quit your day job.
As a generalization, CPC networks are solid, reliable, stable, and keep their promises, whereas CPM networks are fly-by-night, slow to pay, and often retroactively lower their rates. CPC networks are willing to give you some control over what ads appear on your site, whereas CPM networks usually claim that is impossible.
Due to webmaster fraud and other problems, the state of the online economy, and the rise in web traffic, typical CPM (per thousand impressions) rates have plummeted from $2 to $1 to 50 cents to much less than that. Webmasters hear about CPM rates somebody got recently, multiply them by their own current traffic, and get dollar signs in their eyes -- not realizing that steeply rising traffic everywhere means that last month's CPM rates are unrealistic now. Even if you go in with low expectations, you WILL be disappointed.
CPC rates have held more stable: I am still getting the same 12 cents per clickthrough (from ValueClick) that I started with, but not the 15 cents I had at the peak. At one point VC told me they were cutting my rate to 6 cents, but I talked them out of it somehow.
And in the meantime, the percentage of people who click on banner ads has declined steadily. They used to say that the "industry standard" clickthrough rate was 0.5 percent to 1.5 percent, but I have never seen 0.5 percent. My long-term average (23,688 clickthroughs on over 15 million impressions) is less than 0.16 %, and more recent averages are less than half that. Further declines can be expected.
Of course, you're likely to make more money if you have no scruples about what kind of ads you take. Porn, gambling, spam, scams, popups, and popunders pay real well, but -- depending on the kind of users you have and what brought them -- quickly erode your credibility and user loyalty.
Because of this, I insist on having veto over what ads appear on my site.
I dropped out of a CPM advertising network because they started running ads for online gambling scams. I can't have those on my site; maybe yours is different, or maybe it's okay with you to work with crooks.
But when all is said and done, the money doesn't amount to much. My site gets about a million page views per month, and last month's advertising check was $44 and change. Highest month in the past year (after my site was mentioned in PARADE magazine, the Sunday supplement to many newspapers) was about $110.
Last edited by Polygon; 08-07-2002 at 03:00 PM..
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