Selling Ads on Your Site

"We are the largest college sports recruiting service in the world. Our website gets over 2 million hits per month. What is the going rate for banner ads and weblinks for our home page?" -- Charlie Levine, National Scouting Report

The good old days of selling lucrative banner ads on your website are over. The going rate for banner ads typically hovers around 50¢ to $1 per thousand banner views. The price is low for two reasons: (1) Since people have trained their eyes to ignore them, the average click-through rate on banner ads is about 0.2% to 0.4%. (2) There are so many billion webpages these days that unlimited space for advertising has driven prices down.

The good news, however, is that the Google AdSense program (www.google.com/adsense/) provides revenue sharing with sites like yours that attract a targeted audience. They provide the advertisers, place the ads on your site, collect the money, and send you a check each month. See my recent article "Google AdSense: Advertising Revenue for the Rest of Us," Web Marketing Today, 8/6/2003 (www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/google_adsense.htm).