Selling Advertising Space on Your Site
This simply involves sellling advert space on your site. The ad types vary from banners (static and flash), text ads and recently, video ads. You will need to place a limit to the size of graphic files you accept, or you will end up with a home page that takes forever to load.
The most transparent way of measuring performance for both parties is by impressions (the number of times visitors view the banner).
There are free software on the net you can install on your site to measure impression, and charge your advertisers per 1,000 impressions.
The current trend in Nigeria is by tenure (duration - weekly, monthly, quarterly etc). It may be hard to strike a balance in this scenario, as the balance tilts in favour of the advertiser. If you have a growing site, your traffic is trending up while you are being paid a fixed sum for banner space for a period of time. If traffic tripples during this period, your income remains fixed. On the flip side, if your traffic drops, or your site goes down for a day or two, the advertiser loses.
The key here is pulling a lot of traffic, and negotiating from a position of strength. If you build a site that becomes a household brand, nobody will look down on you or offer peanuts for advertising on your site. Let's say for example you get 1,000,000 visits a month, and your site needs no introduction, you can name your price within reasonable limits, especially if your site is a nich site that attracts a particular class of people (which means high quality traffic). If you plan to make money through online advertising, you may want to focus more on traffic (more like seek ye first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and all other things shall be added unto you.) See ye first massive traffic, and advertisers will look for you.
Online advert revenues have started overtaking offline advert revenues in the US, and the future trend is advertising online, so more and more companies will realise the need to advertise online, and will funnel their advert budget in the direction of online advertising in the coming years. The highest circulating newspaper in Nigeria boasts of daily circulation of 80,000 - 120,000 copies a day. You pay N250K for a full page advert which people look at briefly and throw the paper away. For a fraction of that cost, your advert will appear day after day in the home page of a site that gets the same amount of visits in a day, translating to millions in a month. For banks etc, the appeal is even more because visitors from all around the globe get to see your advert.
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