Article
Making Money From A Content Site
Install your own ad serving solution:
Before you do anything else, you will need to install ad management software on your site in order to rotate banners around your site and provide advertisers with an account where they can track clickthroughs and impressions. Below I have included a quick run down of several of the most popular ad management systems out there for small to medium sized sites:
AdCycle is a PERL & mySQL based ad serving solution which had almost every feature you could ask for, at an extremely competetive $89 price-point. AdCycle's extensive feature set includes impression and clickthrough capping, rich media support, campaign priority control, campaign grouping, and timed delivery which allows you to distribute a certain number of impressions over a period of time.
This set of Perl scripts ($50) is what I started out with when I originally started selling advertising. It provides all of the basic statistics to you and your advertisers, and the latest version even predicts when an ad campaign will finish running.
The big problem with WebAdverts is the enormous amount of server resources it uses -- which means it isn't suitable for any sites that get more then 100,000 pageviews per month unless they are hosted on a dedicated server. Many webhosting companies (including Hiway which hosts over 100,000 sites) have banned WebAdverts as it causes too many problems for them.
If you decide to use this relatively low-end solution, be prepared to spend a couple of hours trying to get it working properly unless you're very familiar with CGI scripts. Don't get the wrong idea -- WebAdverts works really well for smaller sites. Just plan on upgrading to a more efficient ad tracking system as your traffic increases.
This program comes in two flavors, a Perl version and a 'C' version. Like WebAdverts, the Perl version is not recommended because it will use a lot of server resources. If you're going to use this program then definitely go for the 'C' version.
This program provides more features than WebAdverts as you can do things like target banners by day and time, show banners when specific keywords are used on your site, and domains (.edu .net .uk etc.). It also keeps detailed stats about each ad displayed including date and time, browser used, domain extension and whether a click-thru occurred. AdGenie costs $345 for the 'C' version which is the one you'd want.
This program is very efficient because it's written in C/C++ and can therefore handle many more ad requests per day than WebAdverts which is written entirely in Perl. CentralAd 4.0 which costs $595 provides Rich Media/HTML support, full campaign scheduling and extensive reporting. However, the program lacks some of the more advanced features found in third-party ad serving solutions such as ad frequency capping and targeting by things such as country of origin or operating system being used.
This is the 2nd most expensive ad management system on the list -- costing between $795 and $1995 -- but it's also the most professional and versatile of the bunch. For example, you can distribute ad banners over a period of time, statistical reports can be emailed to your advertisers, access logs for each banner are kept, and you can have multiple banners of the same size on one page without having the same ad being displayed twice and much more.
AdJuggler is also available as a hosted solution (meaning it's installing on their servers) and in an enterprise version. You can view a comparison of the different versions at www.thruport.com/adjuggler.
This is the solution that we used at SitePoint for a long time. It provides features (such as automatic emailing of stats to advertisers, country targetting etc.) very similar to AdJuggler albeit at a higher price, $149 per month for serving of up to 25,000 impressions per day. Only part of the program is installed on your server, the rest lies on Spinbox.com from which all of your banners are loaded from.
We decided to migrate away from Spinbox due to major reliability and speed problems that they began having. Things may have changed since then.
AdRunner is an outsourced solution run by MyComputer that we are currently using at SitePoint. Over the 8 months that we've been using them, SitePoint has nothing but praise for the ad management system and the people behind it. Speed, reliability, features and support are all fabulous.
AdRunner is priced on a CPM basis (per 1000 ads served) and can handle sites of nearly any size. The targeting capabilities of AdRunner are mind boggling. For example, if you wanted to, you can target a banner to be only served on Monday between 3 and 4PM to Windows 95 users running Netscape 3 at a resolution of 800x600 with the Flash plugin, cookies enabled, visiting from Nepal by following a link from Yahoo.
Update: AdRunner is no longer accepting new clients, and it looks like they may bite the dust.
At $450 the price of AdvertPro is competetive with CentralAd 4.0. AdvertPro features support for rich media, distribution of ads over a set amount of time, and solid reporting features. Targeting is limited to hours of the day, operating system and browser. AdvertPro is written in PERL with a SQL database and therefore may have problems on really high traffic sites (several million ad impressions a month) but should more than suffice for everybody else.
You'll find several other programs listed at CGI- Resources.com