best use of banner ads?

[batcave]

I am wondering - what should I use my banner ad space for? It's hardly even worth using ANY ad company that I know of, and even if I did use them I would either get cancelled or hardly make a dime - even with a lot of traffic.

My question is - what can I put in that spot to actually make it somewhat worthwhile to have banners? I have already took some banners off the pages, makes it much cleaner - but would appreciate to see what other people are doing in this advertising downturn.

[Matt]

Greetings,

I took a look over your sites and I noticed one thing which made me laugh. You have a link to "Popup Ad Killers"(which, ironically, links to a page which utilizes a popup). Obviously, your advertising partners aren't going to stay with you very long with that kind of attitude. It is in your best interest to work with your partner to increase advertising performance, as well as to develop your creatives and formats in such a way as they are attractive and not too intrusive for your users.

Also, ensure your content(and your user's content) is up to standard with what your advertising partners want. Banners are dead, but you should be able to a good rate on popups(if you can stomach that route).

Farewell,

[batcave]

I'm afraid I hate popups - and anyone that allows them is nuts :) I want my users to have a nice site not an advertising popup spam site - and giving them access to the adkillers is a good way to do so :)


I'm not so sure advertising is dead, just beaten senseless and left to die by the side of the road maybe ..


JDT

[Spookums]

When my first website deisgn was up (down for redesign now)
I had quite a chunk of local fame going on, so companies and stores that had no website, would pay me, much like you would pay a newspaper to run an ad.

I would scan in, or create an ad for them, plugging their store.
& they would pay me a nice fee per-week.
This may seem old-fashioned.... but it works.

If you have a heavy-traffic website, and know a few local stores e.t.c. that may want to take part in this sort of "newspaper-style" pluggin, you can make a pretty sweet small fortune per--month.

Letme say, from experience .... it works VERY WELL!

[Matt]

Greetings,

Well, lynch me from a tree and call me nuts! :)

Actually, popups/popunders are very agreeable these days. The one issue making them so pleasant is, what most advertisers have, the frequency cap. For instance, to get maximum performance, yet prevent burn out, a freq cap of 1, 2 or 3 days may be set.

Our situation at RedRival is a wonderful compromise, I think. We currently rotate a few advertisers(popups), but any given user will only see one popup every N minutes. This allows for the proper revenue generation while allowing an easy, generally unintrusive visit to any RedRival.com site, or any sites in a series.

Maybe you should try out some popups with a 1 or 2 day freq cap. You may find yours users prefer them when they only see an ad a day and, at the pay rate popups are going for, you may find you're making more money than your banners/buttons/etc anyway.

Farewell,