To put it simply, what is a “typical” banner-ad cost?
I know it varies, and probably greatly, with a banner on Amazon.com being somewhat more valuable than one on expiredprescriptionmedicines.com, but I’m looking for a starting point.
I got a quote from a single site on which I was planning on advertising; with an average of 60K “exposures” per banner, this site charged $300 a month, or $200/mo if paid three months or more at a time.
Is that somewhat normal? High? Low? Also note that was “targeted”- IE, the site was large, extensive and for a specialized sport, with the advertising coming from others in the same sport.
(As an example, mountain bike makers advertising on a site devoted to mountain bikers.)
I guess the question is, what’s a typical, acceptable “cost per thousand exposures” (called CPM, I’m told) for an average banner ad?
I dont have the answer to your question, but I would just like to recommend fark.com if you are looking for a site that gets A LOT of visitors and has fairly cheap ads.
A) I’m not looking for random traffic. If I’m buying the advertising, I want it targetted. Fark and Slashdot are predominantly geek-oriented, and while that covers a wide variety of other sports and hobbies, if I’m gonna put coin in banners, it’ll be in high-traffic sites more directly related to my audience.
And B) I was, actually, looking at selling banner space on my own sites. Between my three major sites, including a bulletin board, I have between 90K and 180K page views a day.
I don’t plan on going nuts, with pop-ups, flashing banners, “shoot the monkey” crap and whatnot, I figure if I can cover my bandwidth costs and a few bucks besides, that’d help me out considerably.
