How much should I charge for the advertising on my website?

A while ago I have answered a question on MarketingProfs about how to evaluate a website as an advertising platform and how much to charge for advertising.

William Leonard is asking:

We're launching a social networking website aimed at a particular group. We want to sell advertising sponsorships to selected non profits or other groups that will want to get their message out to our members.

Our issue is How much do we charge the sponsor?


Well, technically the price of advertising at your website is relatively easy to calculate. But first let me tell you something. It absolutely does not matter how you evaluate your website as an advertising platform. If you're only launching your site, I hazard a guess that you have to promote it first just to make sure that the group you are aimed at does really visit your website. After completing marketing surveys of your actual visitors (which you will be able to do properly after several months of actual and active life of your newly created web-project using for example daily polls) you will get a foretaste of your users profile types. Only after you conduct this research you may start offering paid advertising based on what your visitors want to read or what kind of advertising they want to accept.

I am sorry to say that, but before you even launch the project you can't offer any serious advertising. At this point all advertising you can offer without misinforming your sponsors are free kinds of ads plus, may be, some paid campaigns which will be supported by aggressive promotion of your own website on the net.

I don't want to disappoint you, but you may offer $50 per 50 clicks from your site to the sponsor's one, But I assure you, until your site starts generating thousands visits per day, it's a fantasy that you will earn your 50 bucks within even months.

Just go ahead, promote yourself, do everything to appear in the first ten search results in Yahoo and Google, get to the point of at least couple hundreds visitors per day - and then sell yourself.