Quick Opinions Required: How much to charge for advertising?

[Alien]

Hi all,

Need some quick opinions.

A third party service acting on behalf of an advertiser wishes to place a 'GumTree' advert on one of my sites (who are obviously a big client) - it's a PR4 site, around 2K-2.5K UVs per day.

They want either a homepage text link or an in-content link for a 12 month annual placement.

What do you think is fair? I'm thinking £500 a year for the homepage at least, unreasonable?

Cheers all!

 

[Edwin]

What do you think is fair? I'm thinking £500 a year for the homepage at least, unreasonable?

A month, you mean? For a year that would be crazy cheap!

 

[Alien]

A month, you mean? For a year that would be crazy cheap!

I have no idea with advertising costs, lol, can you tell?!

I've e-mailed the service in the meantime saying I have a price in mind for annual cost and asked what is the fee from their perspective. We'll see....:mrgreen:

 

[Alien]

LOL, I've just had a reply that says their 'budget' is £150 A YEAR.

I think not!

 

[Systreg]

@ Alien, do a Google for "rate cards" and see if you can find any sites with similar visitor numbers to yours, see what they're charging to give you an idea.

A lot of big outfits have rate cards on their sites, so that advertisers can see at a glance what an ad placement costs for each part of a site, might be worth you having such a page on your site with prices, once you work out what you intend to charge.

 

[Alien]

@ Alien, do a Google for "rate cards" and see if you can find any sites with similar visitor numbers to yours, see what they're charging to give you an idea.

A lot of big outfits have rate cards on their sites, so that advertisers can see at a glance what an ad placement costs for each part of a site, might be worth you having such a page on your site with prices, once you work out what you intend to charge.

Thanks, appreciate that. Had a look, I can only see rate cards for the big players though so far - BBC, Guardian, Metro, big newspapers, etc.

Will continue looking.

 

[Edwin]

Ok, say you have 2K uniques per day to the page that the ad will be on.

Assuming nothing changes, then that will be a little over 700,000 people viewing that page in a year.

At £10 CPM (per 1000 impressions) that would be £7,000/year. And £10 CPM is low for highly targetted ad space, especially since that's "page impressions" whereas you're talking about distinct unique visitors.

Of course "junk" ad space (like on frivolous free tool and game sites) doesn't sell for anything like that amount (maybe 1/10th to 1/20th or even less) whereas ad space on "branded" sites like big name magazines, newspapers and so on could go for 4x-5x that much!

 

[Alien]

Ok, say you have 2K uniques per day to the page that the ad will be on.

Assuming nothing changes, then that will be a little over 700,000 people viewing that page in a year.

At £10 CPM (per 1000 impressions) that would be £7,000/year. And £10 CPM is low for highly targetted ad space, especially since that's "page impressions" whereas you're talking about distinct unique visitors.

Of course "junk" ad space (like on frivolous free tool and game sites) doesn't sell for anything like that amount (maybe 1/10th to 1/20th or even less) whereas ad space on "branded" sites like big name magazines, newspapers and so on could go for 4x-5x that much!

Thanks Edwin, very useful insight there.

I think they taking the P with their 'budget' TBH and considering how large their client is too!

I think I'll reply and say it would be at least £500 per month for a homepage text link - and this is a quality site.

 

[Blossom]

It's impossible to give a fair estimate as there's not enough information.

Are they looking for the SEO benefits or traffic benefits or both? There is no point quoting someone traffic-based prices if they are doing it for the SEO benefits. It will seem ridiculously expensive.

How many other text links are there? How many other outbound links are there? Will the link be nofollow?

What is the niche like - is it hard to find advertising spots? Is it very competitive?

In-content links are normally one off payments, so assuming it's not on the homepage, £150 per year is pretty reasonable for one link.

 

[Alien]

It's impossible to give a fair estimate as there's not enough information.

Are they looking for the SEO benefits or traffic benefits or both? There is no point quoting someone traffic-based prices if they are doing it for the SEO benefits. It will seem ridiculously expensive.

How many other text links are there? How many other outbound links are there? Will the link be nofollow?

What is the niche like - is it hard to find advertising spots? Is it very competitive?

In-content links are normally one off payments, so assuming it's not on the homepage, £150 per year is pretty reasonable for one link.

Unsure Blossom - I shall attempt to ascertain this. Even so though £150 a year seems way to cheap to me (this site leads the field in this niche and has done so for many years).

There are other homepage text links (4/5), but all to internal sites, not external adverts like this one would be.

I think we'll pop up a rates card on the site too as has been suggested for future advertisers.

Thanks for the insight.

 

[newguy]

It all depends on the type of site etc. There's not enough information really. You mention that the site leads the field is this niche though, which is of course promising. As they may have targeted you due to that they could be trying their luck with a low offer.

 

[binny]

I was quoted $450 per 100,000 impressions for a very small banner ad on an internal page of an engineering site last week, I don't think £150 buys shit the price of advertising hasn't dropped that much.

 

[tifosi]

Just resurrecting this thread a while. Since I've moved all my sites from parking pages to my own custom landing page (categorised adsense &affiliate products etc) I'm getting frequent emails from what looks like advertising middlemen asking to put links / ads on my sites.

Curious what others are charging for flat fee advertising (month/3/6/12) on similar sites e.g. small minisites

In the long run that's where all the sites will be migrated to

S

 

[Brassneck]

It's impossible to give a fair estimate as there's not enough information.

Are they looking for the SEO benefits or traffic benefits or both? There is no point quoting someone traffic-based prices if they are doing it for the SEO benefits. It will seem ridiculously expensive.

How many other text links are there? How many other outbound links are there? Will the link be nofollow?

What is the niche like - is it hard to find advertising spots? Is it very competitive?

In-content links are normally one off payments, so assuming it's not on the homepage, £150 per year is pretty reasonable for one link.

Agree with Jenni - £150 is about par for the course. You are selling a text link here most probably not a 'real' ad.

Stephen.

 

[peter_w]

I would agree that £150 seems about right for the kind of ad GumTree want (I'm sure they are DELIGHTED with this thread, by the way ).

Having worked in the industry for 4 years now, you just "know" what kind of price is right based on all of the details (which includes both the site in question... and the client). These days I even know what I can charge certain agencies, and how far up they will come from their initial "offer". I'd have personally gone back to GumTree at around £240 [explaining that at £20 a month it is a lot less than other clients pay], expecting to deal at £200).

But really, all of this depends on whether you actually want to sell text links in the first place and what the site earns. It's all about weighing up the risk against the reward.