Question

Topic: Advertising/PR

How Do You Determine Your Online Advertising Rates

Posted bytiSHOPPEon11/24/2007 at 11:20 AM ET 125 Points
I have a website that is ramping up for a major upgrade in quality, usability and content. It is already doing decent traffic for a niche site but we are going to be adding more advertising space and our old model of pricing just won't cut it anymore.

We were charging $600 month for a banner ad - that's it! And there usually wasn't any more than two or three on the whole site... anyway.

The site is sustainablebusiness.com and we were doing about 286,000 visitors a month, 64,000 unique and around 700,000 page views a month.

We have tried comparing to some other sites but we can't seem to figure out how people are coming up with their rates? Compared to similar sites we have researched - some might do less traffic and have higher rates and some have lower rates with higher traffic.

We just want to charge a fair price for the site. We know it has value and people use it as a resource. We don't want anyone to feel like they are getting gouged and we don't want to undervalue our product. We just want to be fair, and we want to understand why a number is fair versus another site?

Thoughts?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted byHans De Keulenaeron11/24/2007 at 3:09 PM Accepted
    As a buyer of web advertising on various services, I have a few benchmarks in mind. From a traffic viewpoint, your advertising product appears to be underpriced.

    But the content of your website limited. From this perspective, sustainablebusiness.com may not currently be the strong brand it could be. Addressing this may enable you to significantly increase advertising rates, but is much easier said than done.
  • Posted byJay Hamilton-Rothon11/24/2007 at 3:32 PM Member
    You charge either what the market will bear or what you want to earn. You also need to, in your case, also reflect the values that you're reporting on, so you need to charge a value based on what's sustainable.

    You could charge a low intro price for new advertisers, and charge more for additional months. That will help the small business owners afford some presence on your site, and be able to judge for themselves how effective the site is for their needs.

    You could also provide another tier of service, offering to email people registered on your site with an advertisement (that the registered people could opt-out of).
  • Posted bytiSHOPPEon11/24/2007 at 4:28 PM Author
    Thanks for your responses. The site is due to come out in a couple of weeks with a much stronger presence and I think should really be a great asset to a narrow audience. We are planning on having a leaderboard above and below the fold on every page, then one tall skyscraper and possibly a banner ad per page, and as many as 6 text links available on most pages.

    I just was thinking when this all started that a certain traffic count would dictate a certain rate based on the genre and audience... but I can't see how anybody's published rates even can begin to be consistent. Then don't even get me started on the published traffic people are publishing... they don't even seem to know, or are as purposely vague as they can be about whether their numbers are page views, visitors or hits or...? I have started ranting a little bit, but the core of the problem I guess is in the valuation of a site, right?
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