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One of the best ways to make money with a website is via advertising. The problem is that many people don't know what advertising options are available to them, so they end up making way less than they could and should. So I thought it would be helpful to give a tutorial and summary of ad services. Hopefully these tips will be useful to all sorts of websites, including blogs and webcomics. If you follow the advice I provide below, you should easily make at least $2 per 1,000 page views from your site. That may not sound impressive to you, but believe me, the information I provide here is way more useful, and the numbers much more solid, than many of the bogus get-rich-quick sites out there are touting. To begin, let me give a quick overview of how putting advertisements on your site works. Ads have a few standardized sizes: the 160 by 600 pixel skyscraper, the 90 by 728 pixel leaderboard, the the 468 by 60 pixel banner and the 300 by 250 pixel rectangle. Depending on who you get your ads from, there may be other size options as well. You should put the ads in locations that people might click, otherwise why would anyone want their ads on your site? Some of the common placements for ads are a leaderboard at the top of the page, or a skyscraper down the side. Check out this diagram, which shows which areas are most effective for advertising. I highly recommend that you plan your ad spaces during the design stage of your site and not after completion. That way everything will fit together better and look more aesthetically pleasing. Once you have the ad spaces set, your chosen ad service will provide html code that you can paste into your site. The code displays an ad, as well as tracks how often the ad space is viewed and how many times it was clicked. This will help determine how much you are paid for the ad space. There are basically three different models for what determines the pay: 1. CPM, where you get paid a set amount per thousand page views, 2. clicks, where you get paid per click, and 3. bidding, where your ad space is bid upon by potential advertisers. Your ad service may not be able to fill your ad space at all times. In such cases you can specify a backup ad, so the space doesn't go to waste. The usual strategy is to chain a bunch of ad services together, from best paying to worst, so that that you always maximize your profit. When choosing an ad service, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, although you want to make money, you don't want to do it at the expense of your readership. For this reason, I would avoid ads that are too intrusive, like pop up ads, ads that automatically play video or sound, ads with suggestive pictures (or worse), and ads that strobe in an annoying manner. If an ad service doesn't provide you the option of filtering out such ads, then they're not worth doing business with. Second, I would advise against wallpapering your site with too many ads. Not only is this a huge turnoff to potential readers, it may actually devalue your ad spaces. I'll now review some of the main ad services individually. This is by no means an exhaustive list, just some of the ones that I have found to be best. If you have suggestions for an ad service I've left off the list, I would be interested in hearing about it. To skip to a specific review, use the following links: Project Wonderful http://www.projectwonderful.com/ Project Wonderful is the service you'll most likely see webcomic creators use because it was created by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics. Lately, an increasing number of blogs and other sites are realizing what a great service it is. Project Wonderful allows potential advertisers to bid on your ad space for a per day amount. The highest bidder wins having their ad on your site, with the lowest possible winning bid (like ebay). When the bidding is under 10 cents, it goes in 1 cent increments. So that if one person bids 2 cents and another bid 8 cents, the second person would win and have to pay 3 cents. Above 10 cents it goes in 10 cent increments instead. So, for example, if one person bids 40 cents and another bids 2 dollars, the second person wins and would have to pay 50 cents. If the two highest bids are for the same amount, the person who bid earlier wins. You'll get paid the winning bid amount (prorated if the ad only appeared a fraction of a day), minus a 25 percent cut that Project Wonderful takes (which is fairly reasonable compared other services). Bidders can include your site as part of an ad campaign where they choose a subset of sites (with a certain traffic threshold or matching keywords), and Project Wonderful automatically places the bids for them. Project Wonderful is a very open system. Your site's traffic is shared publicly so that bidders know the value of your ad spaces. Project Wonderful provides a number of options for your ad space. First, you can choose to only accept bids over some minimum. I would suggest avoiding putting a minimum. Seeing that there is a minimum can be off-putting to some potential advertisers, which will make you less money in the long run because the demand is lower. The only exception is if you have a product you want to sell. Then you might feel that the ad space is better utilized advertising that product if the bids are too low. The next issue is which ads to accept on your site. There are three options: 1. you can accept everything, 2. you can only accept family friendly ads, or 3. you can accept bids by hand. Which option you choose is mainly dependent on what kind of site you run. If your main customer is young children and you absolutely can't have any inappropriate ads on your site, then you'll want to choose option 3. In general, I find "accept everything" to be the best for the rest of us. If an inappropriate ad does pop up, Project Wonderful allows you to ban that advertiser from your site. More people will bid on your ad space (and drive up the price) if they don't have to wait for the ad to be approved. In addition, if you choose to accept ads by hand, it actually takes a little while from the time the bid is made to Project Wonderful notifying you to you okaying the bid. Most of the bids in campaigns expire within two days. Since it will sometimes take up to a day between when the ad was placed, till you okaying it, you're definitely losing money this way. You'll also need to decide the size and quantity of your Project Wonderful ads slots. My philosophy is to put at least one large ad in a prominent place and at least a few smaller ads (like the 117 by 30 pixel buttons). The larger ad is for people who want to bid directly on your site. The buttons are because they will inevitably be filled by campaigns (which are most often button advertisements). Even if you put the buttons in a rather poor place, they will get filled for this reason, netting you an extra 20 to 40 cents per day. Generally 4 to 5 buttons is enough. If you have too many buttons and the demand is not great enough, it will drive the price down. Out of all the ad services, Project Wonderful is most unique in that it is so heavily used by webcomic creators. This makes Project Wonderful a useful tool for becoming aquatinted with the webcomic community. Just by having a productive ad spot, people will visit your site to see from where they are getting the hits from. Because of the community building benefits, even though you may make more money from some of the other services, I would highly suggest adding Project Wonderful if you're just starting out with a webcomic. One final note is that the relatively small community of Project Wonderful users can be a detriment once your site gets sufficiently popular. Because there are no companies like Nike or Coca-cola advertising through Project Wonderful, there is only so much a potential advertiser can afford. For this reason, you'll see many of the highest traffic sites (like SMBC) use Project Wonderful as secondary ads and other ad services for the most prominent ads spots. Update September 2009: I have decided to replace the buttons with large square ads in the left column. These make a little more than the buttons did. I could probably throw some buttons on and make a little extra money with them too. But this would only make an extra 20 cents a day, and I'd prefer to have a less cluttered site. Google Adsense https://www.google.com/adsense/ If Project Wonderful is the most transparent of all the ad services, then Google Adsense a complete black box. And that black box is hidden in a safe, under a mountain, on an unknown planet. It's really a complete mystery what's going on with Adsense. How Adsense works is that you tell them the size of the space you want to fill, and they'll serve ads to your site from their clients who use Google Adwords. How Google calculates the money you make is a complete mystery. The stats they give are basically the number of page views on your site, the number of clicks on ads, and how much you made. Although you clearly make more money for more clicks, how much you make for an individual click is not provided . If you use Adsense you'll find that some days you'll make a bunch of money, and other days you'll make next to nothing. And since Google considers their ad distribution techniques to be trade secrets, you'll never know why. I don't even think you can tell what cut Google takes from your profits. Because Adsense almost only pay for clicks (and not just views), it is hard to make much when you are just starting out. Over the last year I've gotten hundreds of thousands of page views, and only made about $100. Perhaps sites with other types of content will be more successful than me. And don't think about clicking those ads yourself! Google warns to never do this, and I've heard of a few people being banned from Adsense when Google suspected them of self-clicking. So what is Adsense good for then? As I'll describe below, the most common technique is to chain a few ads together for one ad space. That way if one service can't provide an ad, it will be sent to the next one. Since Google has the highest fill rate and pays the least, it's ideal for being the last in the chain. ADSDAQ For a while ADSDAQ was incredibly popular with blogs and webcomics, and for good reasons. For a modest amount of traffic (and by that I mean roughly 1000 or more page views per day), it pays better than any of the other services here. In addition, all the ads are from mainstream companies such as AT&T or Kaiser Permanente, so you don't have to worry about something controversial appearing on your site. Unfortunately, during the end of 2008, ADSDAQ began dropping many blogs and webcomics from their list of publishers. It is also now harder to sign up with them if you are just starting out. That said, if you have a professional, high-quality site, it doesn't hurt to see if they'll take you. If you have a webcomic, it especially helps if you have an accompanying blog, since this gives them more text to mine for placing ads. How ADSDAQ works is that for each ad spot you have, you specify how much you'll charge for an ad to appear there. That's right, you get to name your price. This is specified as a dollar amount per 1000 page view (called the CPM for "cost per mil"). If ADSDAQ can fill the space for the price you specify, they will. If they can't fill the space, they'll fill the space with a replacement of your choice, such as having another ad service fill it. You can even make your own ads for things from your store and use that as the backup ad. The most common question people ask is what CPM should I use for my ad space. The lower you set the price, the higher the fill rate. But I've found (almost paradoxically) that as long as you choose a "reasonable" CPM, you make just about the same money. For example, I put the CPM at $1 and I got a 30% fill rate. I put the CPM at $3 and I got a 10% fill rate. So basically I was making the same amount of money either way. But the latter case was clearly preferable because when ADSDAQ couldn't fill it I could send the space to another advertiser more often. On the other hand, if I were to choose $10 CPM, my fill rate would be so low that I'd barely make any money. So there's some sweet spot, and the only way to find it is through experimentation. Six Apart Media Six Apart is the most recent service I've added. They are the same company that own TypePad and Movable Type, so as you can guess, their service caters toward bloggers. Nevertheless, they seem to have a lot of attractive qualities for webcomics as well. When you sign up with Six Apart, they review your site and give you a list of potential advertisers, including samples of their ads and the CPM or cost per click for each. At any time you can reject any of the ads that you don't want on your site. All the ads I've seen are mainstream, family friendly, and professional, so I've never had to reject anything. I find Six Apart pays slightly less than ADSDAQ, so they may be a great alternative for blogs and webcomics that were banned from ADSDAQ during the end of 2008. They also have less stringent traffic requirements, so they're easier to join than Tribal Fusion. Burst Media Burst Media is a little more work to get started with in comparison to Project Wonderful, Adsense, and ADSDAQ. They require a minimum of 20,000 unique views or 100,000 page views a month. You must have a privacy policy somewhere on your site. And the ads must be in specific places on your site. You have to submit a request to join Burst Media, and it take some time to have your site reviewed. Like ADSDAQ, Burst Media caters to lots of big name advertisers, like Toyota and Verizon. Unlike ADSDAQ, they also have some more adult oriented ads (or things like smoking or alcohol related ads), but there are A LOT of different options for which ads you want on your site. Categories include video, audio, military, religious, animated, popups, pulldowns, fullscreen, and on and on. It's actually a little intimidating to go through, and I wasn't even familiar with many of the terms. Once you have chosen which categories can run on your site, you get a list of "campaigns" that you can choose for your ad space. Each campaign consists of a graphical ad, and how much you'll get paid if that ad runs on your site (some are by CPM and some are per click). If you don't like a particular ad, or you don't think it pays enough, you can block it from appearing on your site. I have been disappointed by the large cut Burst takes from my revenue (45%!) as well as their low fill rate. Because of this, I decided to stop running their ads in favor of Six Apart. Webcomics World http://www.webcomicsworld.com/ Webcomics World is a ad service run by a familiar name to the webcomics community, Joey Manley (of Modern Tales and Webcomics Nation). Unlike the other ad services here, Webcomics World doesn't actually do business with the advertisers (as far as I know). Instead they aggregate the ads from a number of other ad services for you. Since they are just starting, they are only accepting webcomics that get a little more traffic (like 60,000 page views per month). You can see a list of some of the participating comics here On the positive side, by working with Webcomics World you can reduce how much you have to worry about chaining ads and following your revenue through multiple services because they do this all for you. Furthermore, they should be able to give you a fairly high fill rate. But there are many negatives about their service, which has prevented me from using them. First, they take a substantial cut of your revenue (like 50% and this is after the ad services have also taken their cut). Next, you have less control over which ads will be on your site, because this is all controlled by them (in their defense, they will do their best to keep the ads family friendly and professional). Finally, they're just getting off the ground, so they do not have a very sophisticated computer system to report your earnings. They basically just send you a check each month. If just getting a check each month, with no questions asked, sounds good to you, then Webcomics World may be perfect for your webcomic. If you don't mind doing a little more work, but having more control and making more money, then I suggest you look somewhere else. Update September 2009: In the last few months I've heard a number of webcomic creators complaining that they are not getting their checks from Webcomics World. I would definitely recommend doing some more research on them before signing up! Adbrite Out of all these ad services, I have used Adbrite the least, so I correspondingly have the least info about them. But since they seem to be increasing in popularity, I figured I should at least speak to why I stopped using them. Adbrite uses a bidding system very much like Project Wonderful. You can even have a "bid here" link by your ad spot. The big difference is that Adbrite has much larger advertising clients than Project Wonderful. While in principle, you may think this would mean more revenue, in practice this actually was a big reason why I stopped using them. Let me explain why. First of all, although they have bigger clients, they unfortunately have a much looser screening process for what they allow. This means I was given a lot of adult oriented sites and suggestive dating sites. I didn't want these ads on my site, so I was going to have to spend a lot of time manually approving ads. When I went through their list of vendors I could see how sloppy they are with who they approve as advertisers. There are pages and pages of adult sites, many of them duplicated multiple times. I've been told that Adbrite is now strictly PG, but I don't use them anymore, so I can't confirm this. Second of all, although there are more advertising clients, there are fewer webcomic advertisers. This made it extremely rare that someone would bid on my ad directly. In contrast, because Project Wonderful is so webcomic-centric, I get direct bids on my Project Wonderful spaces all the time. Finally, I've heard rumors that Adbrite is involved with many of the spam advertisements you see on the internet (like the ones that make you think your computer's hard drive will be erased). I've also heard that the coding in Adbrite ads can be used to exploit spyware, trojans, and viruses. I don't know if any of this is true, but I don't want to allow a company with such a questionable reputation access to my website. Summary of My Ad Strategy I figured it might be helpful if I give a quick summary of the ads I have on my site and estimates of how much they make me. This will give you a place to start when it comes to putting ads on your own site. Even better, hopefully some of you will see this summary and give me suggestions on how to better my ad strategy! From Project Wonderful, I have two square ads on the left sidebar and one skyscraper on the right sidebar. These are all set with no minimum bid requirement. I then have another skyscraper on the right sidebar, a rectangle near the bottom of the site, and a leaderboard right at the foot of the site. These are all set to chain from ADSDAQ to Six Apart to finally Adsense. Given this setup, and the fact I get around 8,000 page views per day from about 2,000 unique visitors (this was around June 2009), how much do I currently make? (And I say "currently" because it has been steadily rising since I first started the comic.) From Project Wonderful I make about $60 per month, from ADSDAQ I make about $150 per month, and from Six Apart I make about $150 per month. Google Adsense has only paid me $100 in about a year, so they've been pretty crappy. Update September 2009: I am now averaging about 12,000 page view per day from about 3,000 unique visitors. In the last month I made $300 from ADSDAQ, $150 from Six Apart, and $100 from Project Wonderful. Ad Services I Haven't Tried Here are a few ad services I haven't tried. If you have any experience with these (good or bad), I would be interested in hearing about it. Yahoo Publisher Network: They appear to be fairly similar to Google's Adsense, so I haven't had an incentive to try them out. Tribal Fusion: From everything I've heard, they are one of the best paying ad services available. They require 5,000 unique hits per day, so I am still waiting to get more consistent traffic in this range. Gorilla Nation: They require 500,000 page views per month, so it will be a while until I get a chance to try them. ValueClick Media: They have fairly easy to meet site specifications and I've heard good things about them, but I haven't tried them yet because I'm hesitant to put more ads on my site. What About No Ads? Another option that many forget to mention is no ads at all. There is definitely a potential audience out there who will feel more connected and invested in your comic if there are no ads present. Comics such as Achewood, xkcd, and Minus are all examples of this. The key is that your comic has to be one that will attract the kind of person who values a site without ads, and I think all three of these comics do that. In contrast I think my webcomic is fairly mainstream (in format and subject matter), so most of my audience probably doesn't care too much one way or another. Going without ads may be hard at first because there won't be any other revenue streams available to you (you won't have the reader base to sell products), so you'll basically be doing it for free for a while. Another issue is that if you start a website without ads and start gaining regular readers, it will probably be a big turn off to them if you decide to add advertisements later. Just something to think about.
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