What to do with an ad-based site?
My current company created an online tutorial site that gets 1.3 million page views per month, and 65K unique visitors. Unfortunately, that only translates into about $500 in AdSense income.
Some friends and I are starting a new company with a biz model based on paid subscriptions, not ad revenue.
At an ad broker's $5 CPM rate, the current site's traffic translates into $7000 a month, but brokers won't touch it (it's tutorials, not editorial/blog content) and we don't have the time to sell our own ads.
So, what should we do with this site? Can we sell it? If so, where?
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Options:
1) Online site markets, sitepoint.com and others have forums and tools that allow site owners to sell and either set their price or run an auction for the site. These are probably your best bet for a quick sale, though not for the highest ROI.
2) Maintain the site and let it run adsense to generate a trickle of side income. One new tutorial a week, or some sort of new content to help with SEO and user returns. The ROI on this sort of site is high, even if the total income is low, the time investment remains low.
3) Try to convert the site to include an editorial / blog to entice ad brokers. A much higher level of time investment with potential for the gains to increase as well.
3.a) To minimize your own time investment, pull a FHWW and look to hire virtual assistants to generate new content or content ideas. Will still require time editing and finding the freelancer / assistant, but can also reap benefits.
Best of luck!
Where are online site markets other than sitepoint.com? What's a FHWW?
What alternative ad networks might be interested in this?
I'm much obliged for your help!
people have successfully sold sites using ebay before.
there are lots of alternative networks for small-to-mid-sized sites like yours. consider looking into companies like tribalfusion.
I own and run SmartFlix.com, and we're we're just now launching some new stuff - we're paying $20 commissions for each customer that signs up for one of our Universities.
100 signups a month is $2k. Not huge, but better than $500.
http://smartflix.com/store/search?q=university
If your site is something that we cover, or that we could cover, send me email at the four letter email address made up of my initials, in the obvious domain name.
Travis J I Corcoran, President SmartFlix
-- http://SmartFlix.com/ web's biggest how-to DVD rental store
Instead of selling ads for other sites, how about setting up an online store at Shopify.com and selling products that your viewers might be interested in. If you don't want to worry about order fulfillment, outsource that to Amazon.com.
Speaking of Amazon, have you looked at their affiliate network? You'd almost have to make more money than Ad Sense.
seek out an alternative ad network. there are quite a few that will touch your site. it won't be optimal CPM rates, but it will likely be better than what you're seeing from adsense.