Survey of Rates Charged for Advertisement

Hi RJ,

I'll try to answer this without going into too much detail as I can see myself rambling on... Apolgoies in advance if this is quite sporadic.

I've developed sites for B2B niches aimed at global companies predominantly and sold their digital inventory to companies ranging in turnover of $100k - $100bn for the last 8 years. So I hope I'm qualified to help you with this.

You first of all need to define what your commercial goal is regarding your audience/potential advertisers and how this will relate to your site an it's content and visitors. Then you need to establish what your realistic competition is (local newspapers/business directories/events etc) and have a look at who advertises in them. Then you want to find out what they pay (ring up posing as a local business).

I'm summarizing the following from what you've said;

• This will be a B2C (business to consumer) advertising site.
• You are hoping that your audience will be local to the cities in Florida, although geo-targeting your audience is not easy at all.
• You're looking to make money from the site!

If you're solely looking to make money from the advertising inventory, and aren't concerned if the advertisers are local (although that would be preferred), I'd stay away from small local companies. There are many reasons for this;

• Small businesses often don't value spending money on their advertising (nor have budgets put aside for it). This is especially the case for online advertising. You'd have a better chance of selling them a listing in a local business directory which was being distributed to local addresses.
• Creatives; I'd be surprised if you found more than 5% of small local businesses who have a ready-made banner to use for digital advertising. If they don't, they'll have to factor in the cost of hiring a designed to do so, which won't be very desirable.
• You have much better competition! E.g. If you're pitching a local wedding photographer to advertise on your site, how do you think your site will stand up against the likes of Facebook?? Facebook can target their ads to people listed as 'engaged' who live in a specific city and not charge a lot for the service. You can never beat that. This is why over the next 5 years, Facebook will be one of the largest companies in the world!

For these reasons, and many more which I haven't got time to think of, you're better off avoiding the very small local businesses.

You can look at the local divisions of larger companies, like maybe a local car dealership which is a part of a larger company. They will have a dedicated local marketing budget, but be warned, you're now dealing with companies with marketing departments which brings a lot of other issues into the equation;

• They are used to vetting marketing proposals and you'll need quite a bit of skill just to get the right person on the phone! Don't waste time sending random emails or letters, you will never get a response.
• How are you going to propose your site? Do you have advertising literature? A media pack? Without this, a verbal proposal is a waste of time.
• How can you prove your audience? You will need to provide audited traffic reports.

Larger companies have marketing departments. These in turn have media buyers and they deal with advertising networks and directly to high authority digital publishers. This is not an easy process to get involved in and if you don't have all of the above, don't bother.

To summarize (I warned you that I'd start rambling!), if I were you, I'd use standard global ad networks for banner advertising inventory to start off with. This will be much easier for you to setup and manage and will make you just as much money. The obvious choice is Google AdSense, but search 'Advertising Networks' and you'll find many more although 50% won't allow a site with less than 100k visitors a month, quantified through a external auditor such as QuantCast.

If you want to put the local touch on your site, why not have things like a local business directory or classified section? These can have standard free listings and the option to feature the listing for a small fee or even sponsor a section of it. Don't start by having it pay only, as you're unlikely to have people pay to be in an empty directory on a new site!

To answer your original questions (although none of these should be important to you initially if you follow the above suggestions);

Rates; These can vary hugely and depend of your method of ad delivery (below). CPM figures vary hugely. If you've just got a standard B2C site with regular visitors then you shouldn't expect more than the 50c - $5 which you'll get from Google Ads. At the same time, niche B2B sites can often fetch $50-150.

Delivery model; You can really only look at selling an ad in three different ways. The two based on viewing are either just a monthly fee (probably easier to sell/understand for local businesses) or CPM (the industry standard for larger companies/media buyers).

Ad Management; You only need to look at using this if you've sold advert on your site. If you're using any standard ad network; AdSence etc. then you can just insert their tags. I use DoubleClick for Publishers for all of my sites as it's a very powerful (and free!) system for ad delivery. It intelligently manages different advertisers campaign's (target impressions etc.) and can target by geo and time zones, whilst providing IAB accredited delivery reports.

Hope this helps!