Viral Ad Network

In my last post, I wrote about how our Ad Network works to ensure that supply of ad viewers, and the demand for them, balance out to ensure publishers get paid the right about for the value they bring to advertisers.

You may be wondering what the direct effects of that are for you as a website publisher; Well I’m going to let you in on the secret to making money from advertising that magazine publishers have known about for years, so read on…

Remember that the amount you get paid as a publisher every month is based on three things: the amount of viewers you get, the probability of them interacting with your ads, and the average amount you get paid per viewer. To calculate how much you earn, simply multiply these together:

£ [total money made] = [number of viewers] * [rate of interaction] * [average price per viewer]

While you’re working on your website it’s easy to forget about the last two, and simply focus on increasing the number of viewers you get per month – but take some time to think about these points:

• A well-positioned ad will easily get twice as many people interacting with it as a badly-positioned ad
• The price per viewer can change by a factor of 20 or more for different kinds of viewers.

Now think about how much time you spend deciding what kind of viewers you’re trying to attract, or deciding where to place an ad – and compare that to how much time you spend trying to increase the number of viewers.

Where do those magazine publishers come in to this? Well take a look across the magazine shelves next time you’re in a newsagents. There’s a large chance that you’ll see a lot of magazines along the lines of  “which X should I buy” (substitute “car”, “computer”, “morgage” or any other expensive good for “X”).

Most people seldom buy one of these expensive items, so the publishers aren’t expecting to sell a large number of subscriptions – or even (necessarily) sell a huge number of magazines. The publishers have recognised the importance of the other two factors in their income – how likely the readers are to respond to the ads, and how much value the readers bring to the advertisers (and the successful magazine publishers  have got this down to a fine art!)

With this new-found knowledge, what can you do to increase your income? That will depend on your site, but focusing on content that’s likely to appeal to high-value users in countries where there’s a high demand for advertising could make a significant difference to the average value of your website viewers, and hence your monthly income.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 10:20 am and is filed under Ad Placement, Getting paid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.