Posted by Lorraine on February 21, 2001, at 14:18:53
In reply to Re: Cost to have this site hosted., posted by Lorraine on February 20, 2001, at 10:22:32
Here's what I found out in my digging around. There are a two (actually, I think three,but I'll get to that later) ways to do advertising and there are affiliated programs. The first is to do a traditional advertising campaign, which typically requires that you have 500,000 impressions per month. The process of selling, running and billing for ads, however, can be cumbersome for small sites (that's us). In addition, you need ad tracking software, which can be simple or complex.
The way small sites do their ads is by using an ad network that aggregates the ad space on individual sites and sells it to advertisers. They provide the ad tracking software and do the billing and so forth and send you a check less 40-50% or so commission that they snag. When you go this route, you have no control over how your page looks or where they place the ads, the nature of the ads (although they usually limit them to non-porno etc), the effectiveness of the ad campaign, or the number of ads placed. So your site can look pretty cluttered with ads. Not an elegant look to be sure. Plus, the big ad repackagers want larger sites and the smaller ad repackagers may have "liquidity issues". They are all slow payers--60-90 days isn't uncommon and have fairly complicated formulas (based on click throughs,thousands of page views, number of unique viewers etc) to determine what you get.
The advertising campaign stuff sounds like to much for this group to handle and the network approach involves you giving up a fair amount of control of the look and feel of your site. Let me know if you want me to look into either of these further.
Affiliated programs were initiated by Amazon and there are several more out there now. They pay some sum of money for click through. I believe you already have Amazon and I think you posted here somewhere what you net from it--which I believe was a pretty small amount. Does it make sense to beef up the book referral section and display a link to it prominently on the site to beef up revenues here? Also does it make sense to pursue other affiliates?
The other way to go about advertising might be to selectively target a few advertisers whose content match your goals with this site and pursue them individually. That might make sense. Let me know if this interests you and I will check out some depression sites and see who they are using as sponsers (if anyone.)
Another approach would be to look for a web hoster who will give you free hosting or a discount based on being a charitable organization. Again, let me know if you want me to explore further.
Regardless of which direction you want to pursue, you may want to place a banner on the page soliciting contributions from members now on a voluntary basis to help fund the site. This would be a good "stop gap" approach if it doesn't pan out for full site support. You would need to consider how you will collect the money--eg secured server for credit cards and the administrative details of that.
Let me know what you think of all this.
> > Just that I don't think it's actually that easy to obtain. If you have any contacts, please let me know...
> >
> > Bob
>
> I will research this if you like. I don't have industry experience or contacts (although I was offered a job running an ezine right before the market crashed), but I do have an MBA and know how to do the research. Call me off if you don't want me to do this. Otherwise, I'll report back after I've scouted the trail ahead.
poster:Lorraine
thread:619
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20001124/msgs/707.html