# Banner advertising: Costs, fees, exposures?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banner-advertising-costs-fees-exposures/221105>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [December 26, 2003, 8:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banner-advertising-costs-fees-exposures/221105 "2003-12-26T08:30:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Doc\_Nickel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5fc32e/32.png) [@Doc\_Nickel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doc_Nickel)\
**Post date:** [December 26, 2003, 8:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banner-advertising-costs-fees-exposures/221105/1 "2003-12-26T08:30:13Z")

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To put it simply, what is a “typical” banner-ad cost?

I know it varies, and probably greatly, with a banner on [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com) being somewhat more valuable than one on [expiredprescriptionmedicines.com](http://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?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

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**Author:** ![culov](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e79b87/32.png) [@culov](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/culov)\
**Post date:** [December 26, 2003, 8:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banner-advertising-costs-fees-exposures/221105/2 "2003-12-26T08:47:28Z")

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I dont have the answer to your question, but I would just like to recommend [fark.com](http://fark.com) if you are looking for a site that gets A LOT of visitors and has fairly cheap ads.

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**Author:** ![Doc\_Nickel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5fc32e/32.png) [@Doc\_Nickel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doc_Nickel)\
**Post date:** [December 26, 2003, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banner-advertising-costs-fees-exposures/221105/3 "2003-12-26T11:30:10Z")

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Well, two things:

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.

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**Author:** ![Doc\_Nickel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5fc32e/32.png) [@Doc\_Nickel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doc_Nickel)\
**Post date:** [December 26, 2003, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banner-advertising-costs-fees-exposures/221105/4 "2003-12-26T21:32:34Z")

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… Anyone? Don’t tell me this is something the SDMB doesn’t know anything about! 😃