Pros and Cons of Banner Exchanges and Banner Networks
Web Marketing Today, Issue 60, September 1, 1999
There are two kinds of banner systems that will handle all the banner serving tasks for your site at no charge: banner exchanges and banner networks. Banner exchanges compensate you in advertising, while banner networks offer real cash.
Banner Exchanges
A banner exchange is a cooperative effort that allows your company's banner ad to be displayed on other sites across the Internet at no charge to you. Typically, it works this way:
- You join the banner exchange and receive a unique membership number.
- You paste the banner exchange's HTML code (including your membership number) on your webpages where you want banners to appear on your site.
- For every two banners you display on your site, the banner exchange system will display one of your banners on someone else's site (assuming a 2:1 ratio)
- You typically don't receive monetary compensation but exposure across the Internet in proportion to the number of total banner views you contribute to the exchange.
- The banner exchange owner may be able to sell to advertisers some of the banner views appearing on exchange members' sites, but the exchange owner keeps they money; you won't get any.
The granddaddy of banner exchange programs is the Link Exchange Banner Network (http://adnetwork.linkexchange.com/). They have a 2:1 ratio, and allow you some choice of categories in which your banners appear. You can also block certain kinds of banners from displaying on your site. There's a great deal of variety among the various banner exchanges.
You will get some traffic by being part of a banner exchange. But though you can select your preference in some programs concerning what category you'd like to be placed, space in the best categories are often already sold to paid advertisers, so your site's banners may circulate in non-related areas.
Mark Welch links to many of the programs on his Banner Exchange webpage. http://www.adbility.com/wpag/ba_exchange.htm
Banner Networks
If your site gets enough page views each month you have another option: join a banner network that pays you on a CPM (Cost per Thousand) basis for the banners seen on your site. The larger of these, such as DoubleClick (http://www.doubleclick.com) or Flycast (http://www.flycast.com), only accept sites with hundreds of thousands of banner views per month. But you may find a network that meets your needs among the 50 or so that Mark Welch lists on his Banner Networks page. http://www.adbility.com/WPAG/ba_network.htm
Another option is joining a pay per click (PPC) network. Advertisers like pay per click advertising because they only pay when someone clicks through to their site. But if the banner network owners offer enough payment per click, such a relationship could be attractive to some siteowners, too.
ValueClick (http://valueclick.com/cgi-bin/refer_host_signup?host=h0104522), for example, pays from 12 cents to 17 cents per click-through (depending upon the number of click-throughs per month), and claim an overall click-through rate of 1.2%. If you were to compare these numbers to a CPM basis you'd generate the equivalent of $1.44 to $2.04 CPM (assuming a 1.2% click-through rate). If you've only sold part of your ad inventory in a month, you might want to use ValueClick or a similar program to sell the rest. Or, if you don't want to bother to sell any ads at all, you could paste ValueClick's HTML code at the top of all your webpages and let ValueClick pay you when your account accumulates $30 or more. (Note: ValueClick doesn't accepts sites with under 15,000 page views per month.) Mark Welch's Pay-Per-Click Advertising Networks page lists a number of other PPC networks. http://www.adbility.com/WPAG/ba_click.htm
If you can only sell ads on your site for $1 to $3 CPM, then ValueClick may be a good alternative to all the work of selling and serving ads. But if you can sell banner ads for $10 to $20 or more, then you'll want to consider selling and serving them yourself.
