When you’ve decided to place ads on your site, the next biggest question is whether to join an ad network, an ad marketplace or to go it alone. Obviously, you can earn more money if someone else isn’t taking a slice of your profits, but you’ll have to invest more time into drumming up advertisers. It’s a matter of personal preference and if there’s actually a network already in place that will bring you the right types of advertisers.
A Network’s Requirements
If you don’t feel up to building your own ad software from scratch this week, an ad network may be the logical option. There are plenty of different ad networks out there, each with it’s own requirements for members. Most set a bare minimum for traffic before you can even consider joining the network, while some have specific requirements for the technology your website is built on (in order to ensure that serving ads is as simple as possible).
There are thousands of ad networks, but here are a few beyond those offered by each of the big search engines:
If you have a targeted audience, it’s worth doing the research to see if there are any ad networks that focus on those particular demographics. That sort of match can help you land higher rates.
Marketplaces Versus Networks
Ad networks are typically automated systems, where ad buyers look for specific keywords or other factors to advertise around. They tend to do better for content-heavy sites, although there are success stories for all sorts of different sites.
Marketplaces, on the other hand, offer you the opportunity to sell ads to a group of advertisers that the marketplace has already gone to the effort of finding. Most ad marketplaces have even more stringent requirements for publishers. Some are even by invitation only, such as The Deck, which handles advertising for such sites as Instapaper.
Having a reputable company handling your advertising does make the process much easier. Even though you’ll lose a cut of the money, you look more reputable to advertisers by association.
Going It On Your Own
It is very possible to handle all ad sales in house, if you so choose. You do need to make it easy for advertisers to buy and place ads — if there’s even a hiccup in how they send you an ad, you may lose that new advertiser. Make the process as simple as possible: unless you’re prepared to invest time into building an ad server that does more than just show ads (i.e. counts clicks), settle for a flat monthly rate for selling your ads, even if you have to take a lower payout than you think you could make otherwise. If the process isn’t easy enough to manage along with all of the other work you have to do in order to build your company, it’s not going to get done.
Check out Part 1.
Image by Flickr user Eggplant