KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays by Comm, Joel (most important books to read .txt) 📗

pick up—but you will get something. More important, you’ll get used to having a site that contains another vital moneymaking element, and you’ll get a chance to figure out exactly how much your users are worth.

That can be fascinating. When you put an AdSense unit on your page, you have no say in the amount that Google will pay you for that space. If the company decides that a click from your site is worth only five cents, then that’s what you’ll receive. You won’t know anything about it until you check your stats, and only then will you be able to try to block low-paying advertisers and take steps to bring in companies with bigger budgets. In a neat reversal of AdWords’ freedom to let advertisers choose how much they want to pay, AdsDaq lets publishers choose how much they want to receive. (Other networks might do this too, but AdsDaq is rare in that it also has no minimum page views, making it a good place to start.)

Figure 3.10AdsDaq lets you decide how much you want to earn from your ad space.

Begin with a relatively high amount, say $5 per Mille, to see if anyone bites, then gradually drop the amounts until you start receiving ads. As the site grows, continue increasing the amounts so that you’re always receiving the most you can from traffic flow alone.

As you’re playing with AdsDaq, you might also notice that the company offers an AdSense-style contextual system. That’s something you might want to play with, but don’t expect it to perform better than AdSense—or even YPN or Microsoft. The inventory will be much smaller, which means that the targeting will be blunter—and your click-throughs will be lower. On AdsDaq, the CPM ads are the main draw.

MORNING FALLS

Because AdsDaq has no entry requirements, it can be a very useful place to begin. You’ll be able to start monetizing those hard-to-promote spots on your Web pages (e.g., the areas at the top and bottom of the screen), and you’ll be able to practice checking your CPC stats as well as your traffic-based CPM figures.

As your site grows from a few visits a day to several thousand a day, you might want to think about moving up a level. The reason that CPM networks place restrictions on the size of the publishers they accept is that they want to bring in the highest-paying advertisers. Big companies don’t want to have to deal with lots of small sites. They’d rather pay a little more and have their ads seen by the large numbers of people visiting the bigger sites.

As your site grows, generating more money for you and for the ad network, so too does your importance to the network grow. The more money your site is generating for everyone, the more power you have, and the better the service you can demand from the network. While AdsDaq is said to have pretty good customer service, that’s not true for all ad networks, especially those with thousands of small publishers. When you’re just a name on a list, your request to block an ad category or tighten up the targeting can be pretty easy to ignore. As you move up through the ad networks, though, you should find that the number of other publishers on the network falls and the quality of customer service rises.

Morning Falls (www.morningfalls.com/network) is a step up from AdsDaq. It does have a minimum page view demand, but at just 10,000 unique visitors a month or 200,000 impressions, those demands aren’t impossible for even a one-person Internet business to achieve (Figure 3.11).

The implementation is simple, and if you’ve already been using AdsDaq, it should be reasonably familiar. You can think of the site as a second gear you can use once your site has moved away from the curb and is starting to pick up momentum. Even if the CPM ads that Morning Falls gives you don’t actually deliver more income than AdsDaq (though the higher-quality inventory means that they should), at least you can gain a little satisfaction from knowing that you qualify.

VIDEOEGG

Once things are really moving, you can think about applying to become part of VideoEgg’s (www.videoegg.com) network. VideoEgg isn’t strictly a CPM ad network; it calls itself a cost-per-engagement (CPE) network. It’s not entirely clear what that means, but it seems to suggest that the amount you’ll receive from running the company’s ads on your site will depend on what the users do, not just on the numbers who reach your site, making it more like a CPA system. The least they have to do is to mouse over the little video ad box the network supplies. That turns the box into a much larger overlay, which runs a neat video ad (Figure 3.12).

Figure 3.11Morning Falls takes you just a step higher.

The ads themselves are beautifully done and generally come from large companies like Lexus, BMW, McDonald’s, and AT&T, so you will be showing quality on your site. In return, VideoEgg demands at least 1,000 active users every day. Active users likely means users who have actually watched the ad, not just passed through a page with an ad on it. You might well need a daily rate of perhaps 50,000 unique visitors to deliver that kind of return.

Clearly, VideoEgg isn’t going to be something you’ll be putting on your blog as soon as you launch. It might be something you never put on your blog, either because you’re happy to stay smaller or because you prefer to stick with other kinds of ads. But it does show how far you can go with CPM income. You can start with a small network earning a few extra bucks by placing banners at the top of your page and later find yourself generating really loud KaChings with top-of-the-range video ads served by some of the world’s biggest companies.

Figure 3.12VideoEgg has some of the coolest ads on the Web. But you have to