I clearly remember in the mid 90′s you could signup for an ad campaign, make $.03/click all day long, and things were never easier. Over time, the payout rates increased at the same pace as venture capital financing, until anyone without funding who had a workable business model could not really compete with the unrealistic/unsustainable rates paid by cash rich advertisers. This worked well for general publishers who were just trying to make a living putting 2 banners on every page of their site; until the venture financing dried up and all the advertisers with negative returns packed up and went home.
Anyone who was left in the industry after the dotcom implosion of 2000 was pretty much wondering around stunned. There was no trust left, every offer seemed suspicious, and it seemed like everything was coming to and end. It basically was. There was a mix of failing companies trying to hang on, and new companies with new ideas trying to turn profits using certain elements of the first internet economy that were successful. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow would be CPA, or pay per lead revenue. If SiteABC can make $14.00/year average from each user on their site, paying SITEXYZ $2.75 per referred user works. If a large publisher with low quality traffic comes on board sending tons of clicks to advertisers it doesn’t scew any profit margins, they just don’t get paid if they don’t produce signup leads. All Hail CPA!
Search PPC (pay per click) still works to generate revenue for the search engine because they often have keyword bidding systems, and can target words to relevant topics across a huge spectrum. One stop shops for large brokers and networks to use to fulfill their advertising campaigns. Sure you can get a peice of this action by joining AdWords, but it’s not really a very indepedent (they take 30%) solution for you. I can only try to guess at what they actually count as a qualified click-thru at this point. Of course without 100,000s of advertisers bidding against each other the most you’d ever make per click auctioning off your own targetted spots independently would probably yield you 1 cent per click, so an ad network like Adwords is generally the last option people have.
I like the Flat Rate ad sales features in Adbrite. For a long time we have listed our banners at flat rate prices in a shopping cart but there was only 4 or 5 sales total during a year. With adbrite, you can set your flat rate price and it’s seen by 1000s of advertisers. As long as your tracking clicks yourself you can do some simple math if you need to see a price per click breakdown of your income.
Related posts:
The blog of a nomadic internet marketer, web host owner, dating site owner and web developer.
I use both Adsense and Adbrite and i can say that adbrite is also a good source of income but not as good as adsense.
i tried adbrite but my ad earnings are not as good as adsense.::`