Trends in on-line advertising

In recent months, many of the large advertising networks have "raised the bar" for Web sites trying to generate ad revenue. The number of page views necessary to join these ad networks is on the rise. This is putting more and more pressure on small sites to either increase their page views or give up the revenue a large network can produce.

So what do you do if you can't generate 500,000 page views a month in order to join Double Click or the Petry Network? The answer is to strike out on your own!

There are lots of organizations that provide "affiliate" programs where Web sites get paid for bringing a transaction to an advertiser. For example, the Free Forum pays fifty cents for everyone who signs up for a sponsor's free product. ClickTrade is a wonderful service designed to bring paying advertisers to your Web site. And Cybergold pays $1 for every new member you find. You can find a great list of places to find affiliates by visiting our Sponsor Directory.

These are all examples of "win/win" agreements. The advertiser gets what they want and you get paid with real money. You don't have to have a million hits. And you are in control - not the ad network. In essence, you become your own ad network by joining with several affiliate programs.

Why is this such a good match? Because the large ad networks are charging advertisers 20 cents per click but typically only paying out about 5 cents to the Web site. Both advertisers and Webmasters are starting to realize that the ad networks are charging a hefty premium and paying out as little as possible.

The creation of hundreds of affiliate programs over the last six months is a testament to the fact that advertisers have learned how to go directly to Web publishers without needing the help of a middle man. AMAZON.COM, CD-Now, Free Forum, VISA, CyberMeal, CyberGold, Greenfield Online, WebCards, and ADPUSH are just a few of the advertisers who have learned to deal with publishers directly.

Kind of.

Unless you can rotate these sponsors' banners your site will become stale and you won't really know how an ad campaign might have worked if it had exposure across all your pages over a period of time. Sure, you could cut and paste banner HTML every day to make it look like things are rotating. But this takes time and still doesn't give any one campaign a full or prolonged track record.

Worse still, without some kind of system, you have very little idea of which advertisements are pulling their weight and which ones aren't. You can't tell for instance, how many times a particular advertisement has been displayed or how many times your visitors are clicking on those ads. You would never want to leave an ad banner up that only a small percentage of people click on when you could just as easily replace it with a far more effective banner. Without a helpful, easy-to-use system, it's very difficult to know exactly how successful your banner campaigns really are.

This is exactly where ADPUSH comes in! Just bundle all your sponsors' banners into an ADPUSH account and insert your banner HTML code once and you're done. Whenever you get another advertiser, just add their banner to your ADPUSH account and its campaign will begin.

By watching your account statistics, you'll get a feel for which banners are doing better than others. You'll have a better feel of each banner's potential revenue. You'll see which campaigns are doing well and which ones aren't worth the time to load the banner.

So, is it worth $12.95 a month to become your own ad network? We think so. In fact, we think most sites using ADPUSH will make far more then $12.95 in sponsor revenue, thereby offsetting the cost of your account. It's like the old saying, "You have to spend money to make money". In addition, we have just launched our affiliate program which pays $5 for every new customer you bring to ADPUSH. So, there you go - join our affiliate program and you already have your first sponsor!

We wish you and your Web site the best of success!