Comments on: How To: Selling and Pricing Your Ad Slots http://www.centernetworks.com/how-to-sell-online-advertising Web 2 and Social Media News and Reviews Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:50:56 -0600 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 hourly 1 By: John Ramey http://www.centernetworks.com/how-to-sell-online-advertising/comment-page-1#comment-44555 John Ramey Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:40:41 +0000 http://www.centernetworks.com/?p=16078#comment-44555 While we recommend that publishers take their eCPM into account, it's not an effective way to arrive at a price, because advertisers don't buy on eCPM - they buy on CPM. So while your eCPM might be $0.25 site wide, you could sell your inventory at $1.00 CPM. If you are limited to just selling by months at a time, then eCPM is about the best metric you can use. If you're selling directly on a CPM basis, we recommend looking at the listings for other sites of similar size and content - just like you would look at the MLS for a real estate listing. If you're selling based on time, such as a month, then lower the CPM rate compared to a straight CPM buy, to give the advertiser a reward for buying a longer term campaign. We give the same advice as above to new publishers with starting slightly "cheaper" and working your way upward. In the case of a user that is already conducting direct sales, it's a no brainer. If you're really lost: take the average eCPM or monthly earnings you make from an ad network like AdSense, triple it, and use that as your base price. We wrote a series about direct sales, what can be hard about it, if it's right for you, etc at our blog: http://blog.isocket.com While we recommend that publishers take their eCPM into account, it’s not an effective way to arrive at a price, because advertisers don’t buy on eCPM – they buy on CPM. So while your eCPM might be $0.25 site wide, you could sell your inventory at $1.00 CPM.

If you are limited to just selling by months at a time, then eCPM is about the best metric you can use. If you’re selling directly on a CPM basis, we recommend looking at the listings for other sites of similar size and content – just like you would look at the MLS for a real estate listing. If you’re selling based on time, such as a month, then lower the CPM rate compared to a straight CPM buy, to give the advertiser a reward for buying a longer term campaign.

We give the same advice as above to new publishers with starting slightly “cheaper” and working your way upward. In the case of a user that is already conducting direct sales, it’s a no brainer.

If you’re really lost: take the average eCPM or monthly earnings you make from an ad network like AdSense, triple it, and use that as your base price.

We wrote a series about direct sales, what can be hard about it, if it’s right for you, etc at our blog: http://blog.isocket.com

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