How to Suceed with Adbrite?

June 29, 2005 2:52 AM

I recently put Adbrite on my blog. But no advertisers have signed up in one month. I reduced the price every week for a text ad from $30 to $10 per week now for a good location in the sidebar. For 2000+ pageviews per day, is it too much to ask for? Many sites with lesser page views and higher rates are full of Adrite advertisers. What is the secret of making money with Adbrite?
posted by webmeta to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

You might learn something useful at GoingWare. Be warned, though, it's maintained by a guy whose shameless self-promotion is only matched by his need to talk about his mental illness. Nonetheless, he seems to have a few good tips on getting yourself and your site noticed.
posted by veedubya at 3:33 AM on June 29, 2005

With 2000 pageviews per day, you should be able to make about $150 a month on AdSense even if your topics are reasonably varied.
posted by wackybrit at 6:43 AM on June 29, 2005

Let's see. 2000 pageviews a day, 14000 pageviews a week, so $30 is $2.14 CPM, and $10 is $0.71 CPM. (CPM = cost per thousand impressions)

So $10 sounds reasonable. I wouldn't expect to sell ads directly at $30 but it could depend on the topic of your site.

As for AdSense, $150 might be pushing it but you should easily make at least $50 a month. It will probably beat AdBrite.

The nice thing about AdSense is that it's automatic - you don't have to actually sell ads. It sounds like AdBrite won't do you any good until someone buys an ad, and depending on your blog that might take a while, or you might have to aggressively promote the ads to sell any.
posted by mmoncur at 8:48 AM on June 29, 2005

Response by poster: How should I attract advertisers beside the price?
posted by webmeta at 12:37 PM on June 29, 2005

Best answer: Maybe an occasional post letting people know you take advertising and encouraging them to support you?

$10 seems like a pretty low barrier to entry, but it still might take a while.

I sell my own text ads on one site, also with a $10 minimum, and it took a long time to get any sales. I reduced the price to $5 and promoted it for a while, and a few months later I had to increase the price because I was overloaded with ads.

Now I always have a few ads running, but it's taken a couple of years to get to that point, and five or six major clients make up most of the sales.

If your weblog is specific to a particular industry (web developers, digital cameras, etc.) it might be worth contacting potential advertiers yourself--I don't have any experience with that, though.
posted by mmoncur at 8:11 PM on June 29, 2005

For some advertisers, smaller traffic sites are not worth the time, energy, thought etc for whatever reason.

I would agree with mmoncur to think about contacting targeted advertisers and suggesting a placement and CPM on your site. Sitepoint.com had a great article on CPMs - highly targeted site can fetch a few dollars to a $100 CPM. Way more than AdSense. The catch is that there is a whole lot of time and work associated with it finding, contacting and maintaining relationships.

I run a Trader Joe's fan site: traderjoesfan.com and my CPM is around a dollar with AdSense. I am working towards building enough traffic so I can get banner ads with the targeted CPM to fund running the site, monthly giveaways and fun stuff.

So I guess you should be thinking about promotion and traffic first and foremost to bring more to the table for advertisers.
posted by traderjoefan at 4:18 PM on March 11, 2006