Anyone here been into making money on hosting pay-per-click banner ads?

I have some questions such as:
-How much traffic is needed to make serious $$$?
-What are some well-known and trustworthy banner-selling companies?
-What kind of varieties of targeted advertising is there, how widespread is this, what companies offer such solutions and is it more profitable than random ads?
-Are there other payment structures that is worth looking at, such as pay-per-sell, given that the advertiser is a company selling products?

Any input on this subject is very welcome. Thanks!

i don't really have much to say other than if i was looking to make money from a website that doesn't sell anything or cost anything (most websites out there), i wouldn't worry about selling the ads up front, other than possibly giving some consideration to what demographic is likely to visit my website, as some groups of people garner more $/view than others.

if you have a website that people are visiting in large numbers, you will find a way to make money off advertising. worst case scenario you can sell it to someone with more experience than you, but i assure you, the hard part about making money on the internet is getting people to come to your site, not figuring out how to put up banner ads or which companies you should use, etc.

i'm sorry if this didn't really answer your question, i don't know the answers to all of your questions. you might also want to define "serious $$$" and from questions 3 and 4 it looks like you have little to no experience in the internet business, in which case I would recommend doing a little research on your own, even if someone comes on here and answers all of these questions.

taylor

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly, but I'm not selling anything up front if I use a banner-ad reseller (or whatever it's called) who pays me on behalf of the advertiser on a per-click-basis.

That is true, but I already have a plan for that. Right now I'm looking at possible ways of turning potential visits to my site into cash. I have content I might be able to charge money for, so that could be a more viable way of creating earnings, but at this stage I'm trying to learn of other possibilites.

Ok, forget "serious $$$". Any income would be welcomed.

Also, yes, I will do research on my own. This is just the lazy step 1-kind-of-research

Thanks for your reply

what i am saying is, you should be focused on building the site first. i could be way off but i think it's really easy to find a "banner ad reseller" who will put third party ads on your website. you can use google or few of the other big boys and customize it to your site. instead of worrying about all of this now, build your site and get the traffic. you won't make anything right away and you shouldn't even really worry about the ad money at the start.

it's like being broke and saying "i need to find a good financial planner so that when my amazing idea takes off i'll be able to intelligently invest my money." this is fine, i guess, but you are better off actually working on that idea before you worry about what to do with the money.

i'm not trying to be a jerk or anything, for all i know maybe you have the whole website built or the idea hashed out, i was just assuming you didn't.

taylor

Haha ok you've got a point

Just for the record, I'm well into the development process, and I'm just playing with the thought of making money off of it. I am a developer by profession, but I've never made any money on private projects. I guess I'll be back if I by any chance succeed. That said, I have a feeling banner ads never will make you a millionaire unless your web site is named "facebook.com" or something.

What are the licensing, taxes, and other factors similar to this to consider if opening your own site.

I reckon I can get 20,000 posters to my site in a month, is that good?

Negative.

If your site is not making enough money that it can't pay for itself each month, its a losing proposition and unless you're really passionate about the subject, I wouldn't hold on to the site long unless you can 'afford' to keep it around in the hopes it does take off.

I would be wary of the standard banner ad due to your typical visitor's ad blindness. It really depends on your niche, the savvier the visitor the less likely they're going to be to respond to your advertising.

Taylor is right, focus on building a quality site that exists beyond being a means for displaying a banner ad or two.

Targeted ads are of course a lot more useful to the advertiser, provided you have a good model of what segment your customers/visitors represent. The problem is that "generic" sites that sell banner ads seldom have the time/energy to offer individual assessements and profiling of your site, and you'll have to collect a lot of information from your users to get a good sense of the segment they represent.

If you have a clear understanding of your customer base, it is usually much more efficient to contact companies that you think may want to advertise on your site and deal with them directly.

Google adsense takes care of a lot of this but you will have limited control over the ads that are shown on your site.

I have no clue what kind of site you're thinking about putting together, but you might want to consider looking at if it's possible to implement as a Facebook app instead. Targeted ads are much more useful when you know the age/interests/music taste of the target. My largest (personal) facebook app has about 8k users (which is nothing) that I know EVERYTHING (that they put in their profile) about and as such I can with some work get a pretty good idea of what customer they represent.

Regarding the CPC model versus the "Affiliate" (you link stuff from a web seller and get a percentage on any sale made through your site) it is usually better with CPC if you have a broad customer base. Also, if you have an international site make sure your customers can actually buy and ship the goods to their country (Amazon doesn't ship everywhere for example). In my experience CPC takes a lot less interaction with the user and is therefore easier, but if you can boost the conversion rate an affiliate model usually yields more $ / trade

(But you should never underestimate what a user might do - I link some books on amazon on one of my sites and somebody ordered a digital camera through my ad for about $2.2k. The books are usually $6 a pop and my rate is about 6-8% so that was a welcome $200 )

Regarding the exact # of users you need, it all depends on the conversion rate (the % of users clicking your banner) but anything less than 50k visitors / month is usually not worth it (that of course depends on what you mean by 'serious $$$'). I have a site with maybe 100 users / day that barely pays for itself (not that it was designed to make money though).

Also, if dealing directly with an advertiser, see if you can have any say in how the banner ad looks. A website about beautiful web pages having a banner ad with a lot of blinking purple/orange monkies jumping around will usually just 1 2 teddy the conversion rate and the visitor return rate.

Fwiw I used google adsense on two of my blogspot sites because it's basicaly a freeroll. I made $50 in a couple of months and then google sent something in the mail saying all adsense account holders must enter this security # in their account otherwise the account will be deleted in 30days. I forgot/didn't care enough and mine got deleted.

IMO if your going into a site just to get pay-per-click $ your just wasting your time. I'm not saying this is the case for you.

If you just want to do this as a learning experience I suggest starting a website and a couple of pay-per-click ads on there along with e-books. Then pay a 3rd party site to bring traffic to your's. Selling the e-books should allow you to atleast break even on what you pay for more traffic to your site. Then you'll get more clicks on the "pay-per-click" ads. Play with the #'s a little and try to find the right balance that gets you the most traffic to your site for your dollar.

GL

I think Taylor really hit the nail on the head. Your focus should be to creating value for your user base.

Once you have built an audience, I would look into working with an online advertising network to help you monetize the page views.

Also a CPM pricing structure is much more common than CPC with most of the larger networks.

While I do agree that you should focus on your site's content - I believe you DO need to research the kind of audience you want in order to get good CPM rates. It would be foolish just to build a site that you're interested in without first finding out what kind of potential it could have.

Basically, you need the following:

1. Traffic. By far the hardest thing to get. SEO, blogging, social media, and other
things can help you bring in traffic for free.

2. Content. What are you going to write about? I would research existing industry CPM rates and target something that you will want to write about. Rates can vary from $1 CPM to $100 CPM.

The big challenge is finding something niche enough that's it's not ridiculously competitive to get traffic, but at the same time get a good ad rate.

Right now I'd say some of the strongest sectors for ads are cars (they are always looking for inventory), travel, education, and more.

-How much traffic is needed to make serious $$$?

It depends on what you view as serious $$$.

30,000 unique visitors a month ought to do it depending on your niche, product, offer or service.

-What are some well-known and trustworthy banner-selling companies?

Like another poster said, adsense works well. I've seen some Copeac (copeac.com) banner ads as well.

-What kind of varieties of targeted advertising is there, how widespread is this, what companies offer such solutions and is it more profitable than random ads?

You could try looking for or creating your own offers/products according to what your website is to make it targeted. For example, if you're selling sinks you could import sinks.

Otherwise, you could look for other's products to promote. I know Amazon has an affiliate program where you can sell basically anything and earn a commission.

-Are there other payment structures that is worth looking at, such as pay-per-sell, given that the advertiser is a company selling products?

Yes. There's CPA (cost-per-action) where you get paid if someone does an action like fill out a form, or buy a product. What you get depends on what the action is.

I am and have been. I should probably have said that in OP.

I'd just like to have the whole package ready when I release the site. I don't want my site to "dry run" half a year, and then suddenly start thinking of how I can turn 50.000 visitors a month into income. Not saying I get that amount of traffic, but as Recess states, implementing for instance Adsense is basically a freeroll. How can I NOT?

... I find it funny that you know better than me what I welcome

I'm passionate about the subject. Although making money off it probably is my primary goal, I'm not considering it a failure if I never do. I'm learning new programming skills and maybe also getting some experience in e-business.

My financtial investment in this project is limited to approx. $500 in new hardware and a slightly increased electricity bill. I'm hosting it from my closet in my 47m^2 apartment.

Thanks to all that have replied so far. I've gotten some valuable tips. cybermuppet, Recess and FastPlaySlow all mentioned Google adsens. I didn't even know about that, even though I realize I've seen their ads on many sites now. That's how little I knew about the subject before I posted. Probably should have googled FIRST, I know - sorry Also I've gotten some number to indicate what amount of traffic is the minimum for creating an income.

I realize that by leaving out information about the concept of the site, many of you misunderstood my intention with this post. Just to be clear, the idea for the content came first, THEN the thought of making money off of it.

The reason I left out info about the site concept is simply because it's poker-related and I don't want anybody to steal my idea.... yet