My boyfriend has a website that’s quite popular (about 15000 hits per month) and he would like to put up some banner ads to make some money.
Does anyone know of any profitable but tasteful banner ad services?
I hear there’s money in sending spam too.
Not the same thing at all. I never requested the spams I’m receiving daily. On the other hand, assuming that I visit her boyfriend’s site, I will most probably do so willingly. If I don’t like the ads, I can stop visiting it.
Well, Amazon.com seems to be practically standard on many web pages. However, I’m not sure it’s terribly profitable. I hang out at another small MB whose owner tried Amazon.com, and it seemed like (IIRC) he found out that he only got paid by Amazon if people clicked on the ad and then bought something, IOW, that he didn’t get paid just for people clicking on the ad. But I could be wrong.
Also, GoogleAds runs on another MB I frequent. I have no idea how well they pay. I don’t think the guy is getting rich–I think he’s basically just using it to underwrite the cost of his ISP, etc.
Your BF ain’t gonna get rich running banner ads, that’s fer sure. 
I use google adsense and average about $.25 per click. YMMV.
I use a single text ad on my pages(from cj.com) and commissions from sales average just over a penny per ten page views. I think that income(if you want to call it income) is pretty typical of affiliate ads. You just have to test if banner or text works better. Pick a product or service closely related to your viewers interests, presumably it will be the subject of the website.
So occassionally I get to order a pizza or even pay my hosting cost.
The “Donate via paypal” button sure isn’t helping him keep his site on the web! Once I donated 5 cents to him and I think that was the first time anyone had actually used it.
If he gets over a penny per 10 views then he can make up his hosting cost within a year! So it’s not a get rich quick scheme, but it’s at least taking advantage of a successful website.
Amazon is really cool. But yes, people do have to buy stuff.
If your boyfriend has articles, he can link to products directly from his articles (which is cool cuz EVERYTHING is for sale at amazon) and if people buy, then he gets some good $$.
Say your boyfriend has an article reviewing a hard drive. He can link to that hard drive on amazon. He can also link to other stuff he mentions in the article, like motherboards or cases or whatnot.
If it’s a blog-type site, he can just make a list of things he likes and link them to amazon. If the site has a theme, he can list theme-related products and link them to amazon.
I have 2 sites that have “amazon stores” and I haven’t updated either in a few years and I still make about $30 a year. If i put any effort into it I could make at least $100.
There’s alot of ways to make $$ from being an affiliate 
Oh, my amazon story. I used to use the amazon links, and for a about year I couldn’t understand it. The site would go weeks without a sale, then in a 2 day period several copies of the same book, not having anything to do with my site would be purchased.
One weekend my daughter was home from college and she mentioned her literary club and a book all her friends had been reading. Wow, what a coincidence. My website just sold four copies yesterday!
“DAD, where do you think we buy the books from!”
I used (I may still use, I don’t remember) the Amazon links on my site. They get great traffic, but I’m usually the only person buying things through them.
You didn’t mention what sort of web site your boyfriend has, and what sort of web hosting service it is on. If it’s a personal web site, check with your ISP. Many ISPs don’t allow commercial sites on their personal web space, and they’ll want to charge you a lot more money if you are using the site for commercial purposes.
One site I wanted to advertise on was going to charge me roughly $300 per month for a banner ad, with a per-banner average (random/rotating banners) of roughly 60,000 impressions per month. “Impressions” just means it loaded, not anyone clicking on it or even reading it. If I paid three months or more in advance, I could get it at $200/mo.
I’m told that’s fairly normal- the site is “targeted” (meaning it caters to enthusiasts of the items being advertised) and gets serious traffic- some four to five million page views per month.
I eventually started generating some decent traffic of my own (front page sees 35,000/mo, comic sees 150,000/mo and the bulletin board sees 350,000 to 400,000/mo) and I’m looking to sell some banners of my own, for which I plan on charging roughly $100 for the same 50-60K impressions.
It will, however, be something of an experiment. Banners really don’t work all that well as advertising, so we’re going to be keeping an eye on “clickthroughs” and so forth. And adjusting rates if necessary, or even dumping the whole thing if it doesn’t work. I’m not trying to “get rich” off of them, I just want to recoup some bandwidth costs.
Does your boyfriend know who visits his site? What kind of research is done into his demographic? What kind of response do his readers get when they read his site?
If you want to make money like a business, you have to run it like a business im afraid.