Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jeffmould 4307 days ago
First, a 50% commission rate seems a bit high if that does not even include serving costs.

The biggest question is will they sell the ad space for you and allow you to serve the ads yourself? Even still, this only reduces your serving costs while you still would be paying the commission, which to me seems like the higher of the two costs.

To answer your question about handling the serving of ads yourself, there are several options out there. Probably one of the best known for a managed solution is OpenX (http://openx.com). On the other hand there is Revive Adserver (http://revive-adserver.com) which is self-hosted and is actually the open source version of OpenX.

One caveat of running your own server though will be that you are responsible for your own inventory on the site. You can always fill any remaining inventory with Google Adsense or similar though. Long-story short, I would say unless you have substantial traffic to your site and are making significant money through ads on your site it is most likely not worth the hassle. If, on the other hand, your site has high enough traffic and your current ads are well targeted and have a high action rate for the advertiser you may be able to start selling your own ad space or find a better ad provider with better terms.

1 comments

Hey - thanks for the answer.

We do receive approximately 1M pageviews a month - with usually 2-3 ads per page.

The company who does the selling now has a sales funnel that we cannot match. Close relationships to big companies to whom they sell very relevant campaigns.

This said, we make approximately $2/3,000 per month with advertising.

I believe it's really small. They say it's because half of the pageviews are on mobile so many of their ads don't show.

Even this considered, I am growing tired of having that revenue amount as my only benchmark. I have been asking for detailed reporting for months and have not received any...

Regarding the choice - why no DFP? It seems to be the easiest one.

I presume that the content on your website is somewhat NSFW, otherwise you would be using Google Adsense or media.net to server the adverts. They give full reports, pay well, and in my experience pay higher for mobile browsers.

You say that they send you a cheque, with no breakdown of figures. This seems almost unbelievable to me.

not NSFW at all! Actually our advertisers are as Top100 as they come!

Adsense was not really performing that well when we made the switch, but even after the switch to the new provider - we haven't experienced the highs we were hoping for.

But yes, the company who manages our inventory is quite respected in the industry we are in - simply horrible with their reporting for our figures.

And yes, no breakdown of figures. I guess this is the wake up call i needed to either start receiving reporting, or sever our relationship.

thanks

Would like to learn about company that can pay better than adsense on regular basis. I am reading this first time.

Edit: I would suggest you to give one more try to adsense, it might perform better this time.

It's an agency. They have actual sales people who have relationships with the companies and sell them ad campaigns on individual sites (in a certain niche).
Thanks, got it, niche is the keyword here.
So why not send your mobile traffic to Google Adsense, and the normal traffic to your current ad provider.
Because I have an exclusive agreement with that agency. It's obvious now after reading some of these answers that i need to review my agreement with them