Don Draper, Ultimate Ad Man from Mad Men
Last post, I talked about how I realized that Google Adsense wasn’t going to make me rich.The amount of traffic I needed to make that happen would be staggering and the whole point of this exercise is to be able to replace my income – or at a minimum make enough to cover some basic costs of running my stroller site. Not going to happen with Google Adsense.
Upon getting to this ah-ha moment, I also noticed only lower pageranked sites limited themselves to Google Adsense. My goal with the stroller site is for it to be a major player in the baby product world. I have huge admiration for Digital Photography Reviews. Don’t be fooled by the interface. This camera review site is extremely popular and respected by serious photographers – both professional and amateur. This site is very much the model for my stroller site and on it, you’ll notice that there is not one Google Adsense ad on Digital Photography Reviews.
In fact, upon this visit, I noticed that they also had a Sony and Amazon ad on their site, which made me draw this conclusion:
Credible sites have credible entities who are willing to pay to advertise on those credible sites.
But how to attract a company like Sony or Amazon? I won’t have a team of top-notch salespeople out there promoting my site and closing deals – at least not right away. 
So after some research, it seemed to me that the best way to get slick looking ads on my site was to join an ad network.
There are a whole bunch of them out there. John Chow has a pretty exhaustive list, although it’s a few years old now (not sure if he’s keeping it up to date). His list is an excellent place to start if you want to explore your options.
Admittedly, I haven’t deployed any of these yet since I’m still in the early days. I have done some investigation into Adbrite, which according to one site, has a CPM of $.15. Yes, that site is likely an Adbrite affiliate; however, let’s assume that we’re dealing with a $.15 CPM, which is actually very good:
My entire blog right now (yes it’s new) would make $.20 for the entire month of June.
Yikes.
Even with two ad units on the site, that would still be a whopping $.40 for the entire month.
So while I can see that there would be some value in an ad network site when I’ve got some momentum, that revenue isn’t really going to get me anywhere fast.
Back to the drawing board.
Related Posts:
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }