Ad Publishing - Introduction
Published: Thursday, January 22, 2004
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What is ad publishing?
Ad publishing is a revenue generating engine for website owners. Advertisers display their
ads in various formats on your site and pay you to do so. As a website publisher, you
have the right to deny any ad that does not appeal to your website visitors. On the other
side, the advertisers may choose your website as their advertising platform
based on the content of your site, amount of traffic, demographics of the visitors,
etc.
Advertisement rates depend on similar criteria as mentioned above. The advertisement
rates have decreased significantly from the late last century due to the dot com bust,
however, website owners can still make significant money out of ad publishing.
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What is an advertising network?
An advertising network helps to connect advertisers and publishers by buying and selling
high volume of advertisements. Usually smaller websites or publishers with low traffic volume
cannot attract advertisers with good ad rates. A network will signup these publishers to
its network and then sell advertisement to these publishers in bulk from advertisers. Most
of the ad networks provide untargeted advertisement because of the complexities involved.
The networks often charge commission as high as 50% of all the sold advertisement to your
site.
On the other side, an advertising agency will represent your website and bring
in advertisers for your website. An ad agency usually brings in targeted advertisement
with better rates than an advertising network. Often an advertising network also acts as
an ad agency to bring in targeted ads for a particular category in which your site is
listed. These targeted ads provide better rates for the publisher. We will review the
networks and agencies in the following articles.
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How to get accepted into an ad network?
Getting accepted by an ad network is often difficult depending on the network.
Your site will be competing against millions of sites on the internet.
Usually only about 3-10% of the applications are accepted into the network
on an average. The basic criteria for being accepted into the ad networks are
almost the same.
- Do not produce, provide or link to: adult content, sexual content, profane
content, illegal content, illegal drugs or related content, hate speech or hate
graphics content.
- Own the domain they are under. The networks usually do not accept free sites or
home pages. If you do not have a domain name, read
more about domain names and how to register a domain in the hosting section.
- Has a public privacy policy posted on the site. Adding a privacy statement is
very essential before you apply to any of the networks.
- Site is not under construction. Wait till you finish a major portion of the site
before applying.
The other criteria that the ad networks consider when deciding whether to accept
are:
- Site content: Is there enough advertisers available based on market conditions
for this content?
- Visitor traffic: Does the site generate enough traffic with high unique
visitor count?
- Visitor demographics: What kind of visitors come to this site? This is often
related to the site content. For example, the visitors to this site are
primarily webmasters and technical wannabes who are looking to build or add
functionality to their websites.
You do not have much control over changing your site content's category since it was not
decided based on whether you can sell advertisements or not. However, you can work on increasing
site traffic by following the chapters provided by
WebsiteGear on topics related to advertising your website.
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