banner ad rates (estimate)

well, i was looking over one one my buddies sites the other day while we are preparing to migrate it to a dedicated server when i decided to through the log files through webTrendz.

The site is doing nearly a million page views a month with around 100,000 visits (10 page per visit avg.). Well to offset the costs of going dedicated we are thinking of rebuilding the site and trying to pay for the costs with banner ads.

Implementing and tracking are technical issues that we are very comfortable with, unfortunately, we have no idea what we should charge for highly targeted traffic.

I have heard of cost-per-click and cost-per-impression, but what I haven't heard is how much they generate. Is $1 USD to much to ask for 1,000 page views?

I know that is more than the server costs buy we want cash to cover some of the services we want to add. This site is just a hobby.

Any ideas appreciated.

That is the key.

As we don't know what your web site is about, lets just assume umm cooking recipes (Yes I'm working on a clients cooking site at the moment )

Visit the top web sites for cooking recipes who would be likely to generate a similar amount of traffic as your web site and who also sell ad inventory. And then enquire, pose as a potential advertiser and find out what they are charging.

You can then decide how you want to handle your advertising by either going with an average price based on the competition or completely under cutting their prices to steal their custom.

It's worked for me. Also don't forget to sign up to some organisation such as cj.com, they are mostly crap, but they are usefull for filling out unsold inventory.

Another totally different angle would be to get in touch with someone like advertising.com with that amount of traffic you should be able to get a deal with them.

HTH

Hi,

You have to calculate how much monthly bandwidth do you need? I think $1 USD for 1,000 page is fair enough if you offer targeted traffic.

Regards
D.

fcolor: well right now the main part of the site is temporarily disabled while we reinstall/rebuild. The forums alone use nearly 10 GB's / month.

silky: good advice. the site is an enthusiast site for firebird formulas. I looked into similar sites sites such as fan sites for mustangs and hondas and such and noticed some of these sites have rates as high as $2.50 per thousand. And the ads are text based and hard to find. Of course their sites are much larger scale and we wouldn't expect to acheive the same rate.

This may just keep this 5 year project growing. Now if we could just multiply the traffic ten-fold we wouldn't need day jobs