What to do with an ad-based site? | Hacker News Reader

What to do with an ad-based site?

8 pointscharuhas16 comments

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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Sure you can sell it.

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!

Thanks for your comments, guys. The site is www.inpics.net -- illustration-based software tutorials.

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!

FHWW = four hour work week

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.

google adplanner says that you get 36k unique users with 430k pageviews

adplanner is definitely off the mark from my own experience with figures. Relative figures are probably ok, but it seems to grossly underestimate unique users and pageviews (and considering we're using analytics to calculate those also, it's rather ironic).

What sort of tutorials?

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

Have you thought about bundling your tutorials into books, and selling them as a print on demand service. Take a look at http://www.lulu.com/.

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.

Have you tried affiliate links? You could probably link to tutorial books like "Learn Access in 30 Days" on Amazon and get decent conversion.

Affiliate marketing. Hands down. Video professor puts out about 55$ per conversion, which is very related to your sites. You can go to cj.com and look for related products.

Perhaps run targeted affiliate product ads for the tutorial being viewed, if possible. (ex: tutorial for cooking, have ads for recipe books, pots and pans, etc)?

That would come under the category of selling their own ads wouldn't it?

What is it tutorials for? If it's something specialised, maybe it's possible to talk directly to people selling things to do with that speciality?

adsense is not the best model when your uniques are so much lower than your pageviews.

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.

Check out http://www.adify.com/

Sitepoint.com will do the job.

What is the site?

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