Ads that pay per view
May 21, 2009 6:08 AM   Subscribe

What ad agencies pay you for page impressions vs. clicks? I have an idea for a site that will provide a very useful free service and then present users with a 5 second screen where the service will be delivered - I need to fill that space!

The major problem is that the service will cost me money - around 4 pence a go. If I can get a payment for greater than 4p for an advertisment on that 5 second holding screen - I can make money.

Unfortunatly I have no idea who to talk to or approach. Any ideas?
posted by xoe26 to Work & Money (4 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I don't want to be a downer, but seeing as nobody else has answered this, I guess I will.

First, ad networks are going to want to see a live site before they'll sign you up. Secondly, there are ad networks that pay by the impression, but they're going to expect the ad to stay up longer than five seconds. Thirdly, if you had a normal web site with static ads, you'd be lucky to get $1 -- in American money -- per thousand impressions ($1 CPM) which translates to one tenth of a penny per impression.

In the interest of actually answering the question, ADSDAQ lets you specify impression-based ads, but as I said they're going to want to see a live site before they take you on.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it sounds like you're going to need to find another way of monetizing your service.
posted by lore at 9:27 AM on May 21, 2009


I should add that if your service became huge and popular, you might be able to write your own rules, but that's a chicken and egg sort of problem.
posted by lore at 9:28 AM on May 21, 2009


I also don't want to bear bad news, but your expectations are not realistic. If it were possible to get 4p per page view then newspapers wouldn't so famously be going out of business. You would be doing very good to get 1/10th of that.

And as lore mentioned, 5 seconds isn't long enough for someone to pay for your ad space.

There are other options.

- Venture funding. If you have a compelling idea, money is out there to make it popular. Works for Twitter.

- Interstitial/preroll ads. "Your service will be provided directly after this 30 second video ad." Yes, we all hate them, but they pay well. As far as web ads go.

- Postroll ads. After your services does its job, take them to a page with ads. Hopefully you can do something tasteful like "If you enjoy using the service, please support it by visiting one of these sponsors." You can even get paid for full page redirects from someone, but I don't know specifically who provides that.

- Subscription service. Providing some kind of enhanced service for a small monthly/yearly fee. It can either be legitimate enhancements (More customized, extra features, remembers a users setting) or just an un-gimped version of your original product. (Unpaid version counts down from 20 before doing its thing.)
posted by Ookseer at 10:02 AM on May 21, 2009


You'll need to look elsewhere. The typical rates for ad impressions are 8-20 cents per 1000 impressions (CPM; cost per mille), in other words about 3 orders of magnitude below what you're looking for. You'll need some way to get more direct funding for what you want to do.
posted by junesix at 4:57 PM on May 21, 2009


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