We're in the midst of setting up a free hosting site and we plan to subsidize our costs with banner ads on all the pages that we serve as well as text ads in all email that is sent and received through our free plans. Does anybody have some advice they can give us ? We're looking to receive $24 CPM. Is that realistic ? We're thinking of approaching doubleclick.com (http://doubleclick.com) . Anybody have experience with them ? Are any of you familiar with other high paying advertises ?

If your free hosting services gets as many members as geocities or tripod, you could get 24 CPM very easy.

Personally I doubt that anyone can get $24/CPM these days. Hardly anyone is offering CPM anymore, those that do say they give $1/CPM, but after you sign up you realise you're not even getting $0.20/CPM. Also, I would read the advertisers TOS first and make sure they accept a free webhosting site.

$24 CPM for a free web hosting service? I seriously doubt you will get that maybe $3 but at the moment probably less.

in the current ad slump you'd be to lucky to get a CPM ad agency to accept you even if you had 10s millions of pageviews/month

doubleclick probably won't accept you but you might wanna try

fastclick.com who seem to be doing well (i don't know personally since they don't accept forum/entertainment sites right now - epsecially if the site is unfinished :emlaugh: :)

if you did get in you'd be looking at probably 90 - 99% default non paying ads making you between US$0.00 - 0.40 CPM if you're very lucky

now if you went with CPC or CPA ads with high CTR and conversion rates you might be able to get an effect CPM of around US$0.50 - 5.00 CPM - a good place for these kinda ads is cj.com

successful, you might be able to get a decent CPM, but that would mean you would have to sell your own banner space. You would need a couple of salesmen to call around and find you sponsors, which I doubt you would make enough money to pay them off and have a little something for yourself.

My suggestion to you is that you contact some of the banner companies and see what the best deal you could get is before you put to much work into this project. The way I see it, the only way you can make money from your website these days is if you actually sell something, product or service.

You are going to have an extremely hard time getting ANY ad network to back you. The reason why? You are putting ads on pages that you do not control the content.

Also, you are going to have a hard time getting a network to back you due to the fact you have not launched yet, and do not have reliable stats.

I have ad contracts with most of the top ad agencies, so I know what I am talking about. :)

I am not saying it is impossible, but you are really going to have to work for it.

You may want to browse different forums that target these issues, as you will see the dilemnas and possible solutions of people going through the same situation as you are.

You may also want to check out different free hosting sites and see what they are using for ads. This may take some research though. Just because you see a link to DoubleClick on the ad does not mean they are serving DoubleClick ads...they may only be using their ad serving software.


BTW, DoubleClick on their online form states you must have 1,000,000+ impressions. In truth, they do not even consider anything under 3,000,000...they don't even respond.

Good Luck!

I've lost faith in banner advertising.

I still can't get a decent advertiser for my gaming site at www.disc13.com

On top of that, I've heard that even Yahoo is in a slump and not getting anymore out of advertisers. So if big guys like Yahoo are having problems, how much more if you're a newbie in the field?

It's just to look at how many DotCom businesses have done down in the last year. It is all because they could not make more money from banners. It is a very bad idea to start a DotCom business now that requires a lot of money and is dependent on banner income.

talk to everyone, what do you have to loose, wasting time posting it here

A completely different question :)
Where can I find a site with inside informations about banner advertising and where an ad-beginner can find infos about words like CPC, CPA, CTR, CPM?

Originally posted by Walter
A completely different question :)
Where can I find a site with inside informations about banner advertising and where an ad-beginner can find infos about words like CPC, CPA, CTR, CPM?

recommended

www.sitepointforums.com
www.geekvillage.com
www.net-ads.com

Aloha,
I ran a site
that was getting 2.5 million pageviews a month we made about $8000 a month on banner ads
it was a aviation site and we had stats on our members also the pilots etc... brought up the fact that these people make good money and advertisers know that they have a income to spend
so it would depend on what you have for stats on your visitors and how much they make and what they buy on the web (according to market data)
you can try to go to www.b2bworks.net see if they can help ya out
we had spopnsors but again aviation is a dif field than anything a very narrow niche.

hope any of this info helps
OH almost forgot if ya want to learn more and have a active but small and focused group try out http://www.o-a.com

My advice would be dont even attempt it. 99% of free hosts go out of biz within a few months of startup. I know the industry, our free hosting gets 34 mill hits per month. The ad networks are junk. Most dont accept free hosts. Until you get to 5+ mill, most advertisors wont even look at you. By the time that happens, you have warez and porn sucking up your bandwidth. So your liable to be dead by then if you dont have a good warez fighting mechanism in place.

With the recent news that Xoom "might" be closed, all their warez is swarming to us, which put us into triple time to keep them off. They are like mosquitoes in a swamp. We had to bring new signups down to 2 megs while we recovered from the onslaught.

What kind of software do you plan on using? If it's that cheap stuff found at cgi-resources.com, forget it. Good software thats flexible and allows you to do what you want will cost $5,000 to $10,000, maybe more if you get more specialized stuff.

Course I know that wont sway you. You will still go do it and prove me right, they all do. Your best plan would be to open a free host, get to at least a mill hits per month...and keep those free customers HAPPY. Then roll out a pay hosting service. After three years in the free hosting industry, we rolled out WorldzonePro, our pay service. We got so swamped with signups from our free members that we couldnt keep up.

If you count all free and paid clients, we are larger than the top 5 hosts here on this forum. If you count just the pay service(which is what really counts since free doesnt mean diddly), we are already probably the 5th largest here. So as you can see, the plan worked extremely well for us. We are now our own largest advertisor. If I were just starting out today, I would follow the lead of the previous hosts who have been successful. Build your own network to advertise your pay services on, and you save a LOT on advertising :)

Thats my 2 cents, $5 if tax is charged.

We would like to clear up one thing about the free hosting site we;re currently working on. We would only be providing "free" hosting to users that register their domain name on our domain registration site DiscountDomainRegistry.com (http://DiscountDomainRegistry.com) . This "free" site would not be open to the general public, so we're HOPING that we'll be able to guard ourselves from the Warez groups.

Currently we're looking at using Home Free (http://solutionscripts.com/vault/homefree/demo.shtml) by Solution Scripts for the free hosting site. Does anybody have any other suggestions ? We do hope that users will move over to our pay site at SuccessfulHosting.com (http://SuccessfulHosting.com) .

Originally posted by successful
We're in the midst of setting up a free hosting site and we plan to subsidize our costs with banner ads on all the pages that we serve as well as text ads in all email that is sent and received through our free plans. Does anybody have some advice they can give us ? We're looking to receive $24 CPM. Is that realistic ? We're thinking of approaching doubleclick.com (http://doubleclick.com) . Anybody have experience with them ? Are any of you familiar with other high paying advertises ?

If ya think you are going to get $24cpm for a free hosting site you are nuts. Check out http://www.gethighforums.com under their advertising section. There are sites that are huge and barley get anything. Sorry but the days of making a killing with banners are over.