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Authors: Joel Comm,Mark Victor Hansen

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BOOK: KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays
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That’s a neat trick and a good way to sidestep Yahoo!’s problematic contextualizing, but it’s not enough to make YPN a direct competitor for AdSense.
 
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be aware of YPN or how it works. Google can be very sensitive in its attitude toward click fraud, and its review process can be slow and opaque. If you find—for whatever reason—that you receive one of those horrible messages informing you that your account has been shut down, then you should know that YPN is there as a backup. The formats are similar enough for you to be able to just plug in the new units to fill the space that AdSense left on the pages, but you’ll have to work a lot harder—especially with contextualization—before it fills the gap in your income.
 
MICROSOFT CONTENTADS
 
Yahoo! should have been the competition publishers wanted to keep Google on its toes. It looks like that space could well be filled by Microsoft (
Figure 3.9
).
 
The software company is a relative newcomer to the world of online ads. Its ad units were only seen in the wild for the first time in 2007, a full seven years after Google started placing ads next to its search results.
 
Microsoft’s ContentAds (
www.advertising.microsoft.com/publisher
) follow the same model as AdSense and YPN. The ads appear in units that can be formatted and optimized, and they are then placed in search results on Bing and across the company’s publisher network. For the moment, that publisher network is restricted, and so is the ad inventory.
 
Figure 3.9
Microsoft tries to out-Google Google with its ContentAds.
 
Microsoft is currently only accepting publishers based in the United States who have American tax numbers. The company is being selective about who it accepts, and even the ad formats are restricted to 10 different kinds of text ads. There are no image ads, let alone any of the fancy, creative products available from AdSense.
 
The impression is that Microsoft sees ContentAds as a long-term rival to AdSense. It’s building slowly, putting the infrastructure it needs in place as it tries to eat up some of Google’s market share.
 
That’s good news for publishers. While it’s still too early to tell whether Microsoft really will be able to give Google a run for its money, it’s good to know that there is a real alternative. Once your site is up, running, and generating reasonable amounts of traffic, it is worth asking to join Microsoft’s beta network. You might decide that you don’t want to use it, but you should have it ready if you ever need an alternative to AdSense.
 
ADSDAQ
 
AdSense, YPN, and Microsoft’s ContentAds all deliver CPC ads. (You might get the odd CPM ad with AdSense, but they’re relatively rare and tend mostly to turn up on large sites with lots of traffic.) The same is true of both Chitika and Kontera. All of these services rely on users being interested enough in an ad to click on it and head to the advertiser’s web site.
 
That’s one way to make money from a site, and it’s a very important way. But there are other methods that you can use, and they increase your ability to monetize your users. One of those methods is CPM ads.
 
Cost-per-mille ads pay a set fee for every thousand times an ad is shown. Usually the payments, measured per user, are very small. Two bucks per mille might be considered a reasonable amount, but it means that you’re earning just one-fifth of one cent every time the ad is shown. You’ll need to show the ad lots of times to make any decent money that way.
 
But when you’re getting tens of thousands of impressions per day, you will be showing the ads lots of times—and you will be making some nice additional income. Best of all, you won’t have to do anything to get that income. To make the most of CPC ads, you have to test different optimization strategies and track the results. It can take time and effort before your ads are really running and earning at full tilt.
 
CPM ads earn at full tilt the moment they’re on your site. As long as the traffic is flowing, the KaChing will keep ringing. And because users only have to see the ads for you to earn from them—they don’t have to click, let alone buy—you can put them in the kind of spots that are usually ignored by users. The reason that so many sites have banner ads at the top of the page is that these locations are hard to miss but easy to ignore. Users see them but they don’t click on them. That makes the spots poor performers for CPC ads but very useful for advertisers who mostly just want people to know they’re around.
 
When it comes to choosing a CPM network, you’re spoiled for choice. There are dozens of networks around that are happy to act as intermediaries, matching web sites to advertisers. Unfortunately for publishers, when it comes to choosing those web sites, those intermediaries are spoiled for choice, too. The result is that many networks have minimum demands for the number of page views a site must generate in order to qualify. Adtegrity (
www.adtegrity.com
), for example, requires at least half a million page views a month, half of which must come from the United States.
 
AdsDaq (
www.adsdaq.com
) is one of the few networks that make no view demands of publishers (
Figure 3.10
). Even if you’re just starting to build up your traffic, you can apply to AdsDaq and start showing CPM banner ads on your site. You won’t get much money for them—not until your traffic starts to pick up—but you will get something. More important, you’ll get used to having a site that contains another vital moneymaking element, and you’ll get a chance to figure out exactly how much your users are worth.
 
That can be fascinating. When you put an AdSense unit on your page, you have no say in the amount that Google will pay you for that space. If the company decides that a click from your site is worth only five cents, then that’s what you’ll receive. You won’t know anything about it until you check your stats, and only then will you be able to try to block low-paying advertisers and take steps to bring in companies with bigger budgets. In a neat reversal of AdWords’ freedom to let advertisers choose how much they want to pay, AdsDaq lets publishers choose how much they want to receive. (Other networks might do this too, but AdsDaq is rare in that it also has no minimum page views, making it a good place to start.)
 
Figure 3.10
AdsDaq lets you decide how much you want to earn from your ad space.
 
Begin with a relatively high amount, say $5 per Mille, to see if anyone bites, then gradually drop the amounts until you start receiving ads. As the site grows, continue increasing the amounts so that you’re always receiving the most you can from traffic flow alone.
 
As you’re playing with AdsDaq, you might also notice that the company offers an AdSense-style contextual system. That’s something you might want to play with, but don’t expect it to perform better than AdSense—or even YPN or Microsoft. The inventory will be much smaller, which means that the targeting will be blunter—and your click-throughs will be lower. On AdsDaq, the CPM ads are the main draw.
 
MORNING FALLS
 
Because AdsDaq has no entry requirements, it can be a very useful place to begin. You’ll be able to start monetizing those hard-to-promote spots on your Web pages (e.g., the areas at the top and bottom of the screen), and you’ll be able to practice checking your CPC stats as well as your traffic-based CPM figures.
 
As your site grows from a few visits a day to several thousand a day, you might want to think about moving up a level. The reason that CPM networks place restrictions on the size of the publishers they accept is that they want to bring in the highest-paying advertisers. Big companies don’t want to have to deal with lots of small sites. They’d rather pay a little more and have their ads seen by the large numbers of people visiting the bigger sites.
 
As your site grows, generating more money for you and for the ad network, so too does your importance to the network grow. The more money your site is generating for everyone, the more power you have, and the better the service you can demand from the network. While AdsDaq is said to have pretty good customer service, that’s not true for all ad networks, especially those with thousands of small publishers. When you’re just a name on a list, your request to block an ad category or tighten up the targeting can be pretty easy to ignore. As you move up through the ad networks, though, you should find that the number of other publishers on the network falls and the quality of customer service rises.
 
Morning Falls (
www.morningfalls.com/network
) is a step up from AdsDaq. It does have a minimum page view demand, but at just 10,000 unique visitors a month or 200,000 impressions, those demands aren’t impossible for even a one-person Internet business to achieve (
Figure 3.11
).
 
The implementation is simple, and if you’ve already been using AdsDaq, it should be reasonably familiar. You can think of the site as a second gear you can use once your site has moved away from the curb and is starting to pick up momentum. Even if the CPM ads that Morning Falls gives you don’t actually deliver more income than AdsDaq (though the higher-quality inventory means that they
should),
at least you can gain a little satisfaction from knowing that you qualify.
 
VIDEOEGG
 
Once things are really moving, you can think about applying to become part of VideoEgg’s (
www.videoegg.com
) network. VideoEgg isn’t strictly a CPM ad network; it calls itself a cost-per-engagement (CPE) network. It’s not entirely clear what that means, but it seems to suggest that the amount you’ll receive from running the company’s ads on your site will depend on what the users do, not just on the numbers who reach your site, making it more like a CPA system. The least they have to do is to mouse over the little video ad box the network supplies. That turns the box into a much larger overlay, which runs a neat video ad (
Figure 3.12
).
 
Figure 3.11
Morning Falls takes you just a step higher.
 
The ads themselves are beautifully done and generally come from large companies like Lexus, BMW, McDonald’s, and AT&T, so you will be showing quality on your site. In return, VideoEgg demands at least 1,000 active users every day. Active users likely means users who have actually watched the ad, not just passed through a page with an ad on it. You might well need a daily rate of perhaps 50,000 unique visitors to deliver that kind of return.
BOOK: KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays
11.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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