Ask IH: How do you get paid from ads?
I have some websites and I want to put ads in them. How do these work? Do you get paid per click? Or do you get paid when people see the ads?
Also, how do I get started?
Thank you! :D
#ask-ih
I have some websites and I want to put ads in them. How do these work? Do you get paid per click? Or do you get paid when people see the ads?
Also, how do I get started?
Thank you! :D
#ask-ih
Hi John,
You typically get paid per click, although there are platforms that pay per impression.
Google AdSense is the most common platform and has worked well for me in the past. If you have a high-quality design/tech focused site you might check out Carbon Ads.
However, a big caveat. You've got to have an insanely high amount of traffic before ads begin to provide you with any meaningful revenue. The source of your traffic is a variable as well (since you'll get paid more for a click from the United States than a click from India, for example).
For a baseline, I worked on one site with 1.5MM visitors/year and this made around $30k/year from Google AdSense. Right now I'm building up a web community which currently has around 3,000 unique visitors per month. We ran ads briefly as a test and it made $15/mo (over 90% US users).
Best of luck!
Depends on the ad network and arrangement you have. Most will do per click on their ads and per impression on any remnant traffic they are pushing (since those advertisers are usually paying for impressions on the backside).
@gilgildner nailed it though, it's all about traffic. I replied to somebody the other day about this and cited that I am seeing ~4$ for every 30k impressions or so. This is on a fairly untargeted website (generic social community, not a blog or anything) so YMMV.
Carbon's not a bad one, but you have to have enough traffic to be considered.
Just cause we're sharing our numbers... I was pushing around 15MM impressions a month at our peak and brought in over $100k that year on Adsense.
What's Carbon? :D
Thank you! :D
Someone else talked about the "programmatic ads" that is Google's bread and butter. The totally works, and feel free to do that.
I wanted to remind you about old school "newspaper style" ads. Depending on the niche of your website, you might be able to just do something manually for a lump of cash without needing to give Google a copy of all your analytics. This can work much better for smaller advertisers because you don't need a huge to deliver on a huge volume of impressions. You have to actually do sales here (and maybe put a little "this space is available - email me @" on the placeholder until something sells).
What niches are your websites in?