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
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).
the idea of internal tagging to start having a better idea of impressions is good.
I'll have our developer work on it.
The problem here is that the company we work with has access to the big names in the industry. Having their ad campaigns on our sites actually adds credibility to the sites themselves.
But I might start looking into cutting my middleman and going to the advertisers directly.
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.
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 will be counter-intuitive here and ask you this.
Is the domain worth 20k for you? If it is, and you think in the long run it will add 20k to your bottom line, then buy it.
If for any reason the startup won't succeed (knock on wood), if that is an appetizing enough .com, it will still be worth its asking price.
I recently read the examine.com guys bought it for 42k. I thought that was a very big risk for a starting blog. But in fairness, i think a domain name like examine.com could be re-sold for a very similar amount in short time.
If you think the .com is not worth 20k for you, or if you don't have 20k - then go for a prefix/suffix.
Buy cheap brand PPC campaigns on Googlee for your brand (I assume the parked domain isn't doing it) so that when people Google the name, they get to you. And eventually if you have constant Ads on top, and your site has a content as opposed to a parked domain,it will rank better in google too.
Yes, that's really where i am: there's nothing (apparently) like that and I would have to build it myself in maybe something like zoho creator... but it would definitely take (me) a while. Especially if I want to add notes between testers, email notifications and the like.
I wouldn't be too bothered by time tracking etc, but I would like at any given status to know where a product is, what's on each testers pipeline and so on.
I think this would have the same issue i have with Asana/Basecamp... project management but I don't really have project, I have items to move across owners
the problem I have with Asana, the tool below etc that they are all focused on projects.
I would like something based on "objects".
Ie the products are objects that can be moved across owners (ie from a brand to a tester, from the tester to the site) and the "owners" be objects with properties (contact info, addresses etc...).
Trello does something similar, but the "Cards" are not interlinked... it's a good Excel Sheet, but not a database (no relationships between tables).
Does it make sense? Do you think I have to have it developed specifically for me? There must be something similar out there...
I use shutterstock.com - with their cheaper plan it works out at 2$ per picture up to 1000px wide which is usually great for blog posts.
I like their search too.
I tried everything from contests to better sharing positions on my website. what worked best is actually buying Facebook ads. with some optimization you. can get fans for around 0.25$ each. 250$\month will give you thousand fans. I found that at around 10,000 real, targeted fans you can give a strong kick start to your articles. but you need to treat your fan page as a different entity to your website. if you use it just as a RSS feed people will unsubscribe.
I would say 3k/month has been the average for this year. I had peaks of 5k+ but it's a somehow seasonal business.
It really picked up this year, but in order to grow you have to put in time that I don't have. I have always wished this grew enough to replace my daily job, but not quite.
1/2X half revenue sounds like robbery, especially when you 1/2 for taxes too. I am sure it could be way more profitable, but I just don't have the time to invest - unfortunately.