Ads on your website, can you make money?

brisck1

Hi everyone,
Im having a bit of a dilemma at the moment and was wondering if anyone with any experience in this kind of thing could help me out?

I have been preparing a website for a while now which has the potential to create aot of traffic and continue to grow well into the future, much like this site has over the years(although not related to it in any way! )

The problem is that I want to keep the site and content/services I'll be providing free in every way, however i wont be able to do this off my own back as I wont have the finances to fund the service provider, bandwidth etc when it starts to expand and gain popularity.

So I have looked into putting some simple ads onto my site using applications such as Google Adsense.

So my big question is: Do website ads really generate cash and would it generate enough to keep my site going if I have enough traffic?

It would be great to hear from people with experience with this type of thing.

Im not overly keen on ads as I know they can be annoying sometimes but I plan on integrating them on a non-intrusive way (no popups!). What do you think?

Right now I know the site has some huge potential but I also need to feed myself and put a roof over my head :P

Zinger549

it depends on what ads you have. Adsense is ok. Banner Ads can be ok but from what i've herd you don't get much control over what they advertise

viru.doshi

And at the end of the day you'll only make money if people actually click on the ads, i never clicks ads.

Kinda begs the question, how does martin of this site make money?

brisck1

Well I know that Adsense can deliver relevant ads to your site, and that you can be verspecific if you are careful enough with your keywords, so im not too worried about that. The main concern is, as Viru.doshi pointed out, will people click and will it make enough money?

It'd be great to hear from someone with experience with it.

And yeah, interesting question, I wonder how martin keeps his site free?

Hillfly

I imagine Martin makes money doing his tv shows, books and radio and perhaps ploughs some money back into this site? It must be tax deductible after all?

:money: :think:

Chippy_Minton

On a low traffic site I maintain, we earned about £90 last year from Adsense.

Nothing to write home about, but it does pay for web hosting etc.

You have quite a bit of control over the ads so you can make them blend into your site.

Astaroth

Martin will make a significant amount from this site - in income terms as I am sure that the running costs are fairly high too - there are a number of affiliate links on the site (like to confused.com).... I dont know how much an affiliate gets for confused but I would guess it is in the region of £40 per sale (slightly lower than the likes of Lloyds that give £110 per sale) and as confused have a 10% conversion rate it will effectively be about £4 per click which is a very good rate.

Adsense is a good option if you want no hassle advertising. How much money you make will depend very much on things like the market you are in and so how much Google is receiving for the ads... Insurance is heavily contested so high prices and so high commission where as snail racing in Togo is fairly lowly contested so low prices and low commission.

I use adsense on the misses family history site and it generates about £10 a month of income so basically pays for itself.

brisck1

Astaroth and Chippy, what sort of traffic do you get on those sites per month? as in hits and unique hits etc? (if you can find out)

be interesting to know as I can compare it to what im estimating I could get.

Chippy_Minton

brisck1, around 350 per month - don't know if they are unique hits from different users.

Seraphim

Yes, you can make a lot of money with ads on the Net - and yes, you can make enough to live on. It depends on your site, what the content is, how the ads are integrated etc. There are many, many factors which will affect how much money you will make. However, if you design a site with the sole objective of making money, you probably won't, so it's a good thing the site got designed first

My personal view is that ads shouldn't be too intrusive - I can't bear places which have pop ups and ads all over the place that interfere with the content, but that's just me

Once you have ads up on your page, there are many things you can do - you can activate tracking which will track what ads do well, what pages and actual CTR. You can tell who are unique and who are repeat, all through really simple interfaces (Google Analytics is a good place to start however it's not strictly speaking accurate). This way, you can play with the styles of ads over several pages to find out what suits your site best.

As noted above, I think people are becoming more 'ad blind' but there is still a market for ads, and I don't believe that will change any time in the near future.

If you want any advice or have any questions, please feel free to PM me

- Seraphim -

garcia

Seraphim wrote:

As noted above, I think people are becoming more 'ad blind'

Errr ... could be something to do with the adblock plus extention I have installed on my (firefox) browser.
Ads? What ads?