Advertising for Web Publishers

[Witchfinder]

I'm running a little web game at the moment: http://battles.interstellar-war.com Interstellar War: Fleet Battles has about 1500 unique active accounts and about 3,000,000 page impressions per month. One of my clients is kindly letting me host the game on his servers, but he'll soon be forced to boot me off as his commercial websites start to take off.

I need to raise money for hosting costs to keep the game running. I am hoping to partially meet this cost with "Supporter Rewards" for people who donate to the game. Unfortunately, I know I can't rely on people for generosity, so I'll need advertising to supplement it.

I've no idea where to begin with web advertising though. I've been developing web applications fo years, but I've never really run a website before. Any (sensible) suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[rico]

Various different options. Google Adwords is the easiest and quickest to set up, they give you the html code, wack on site... jobs a goodun.

Various other companies will pay you to run ads, people like www.ukbanners.com is an example.

Feel free to email me with more specifics, I work in online marketing

[tinman0]

YHM

[Witchfinder]

Google-ads scrape the site for content and start following links, which leads to funky things happening! We tried them and they were just too clever for their own good. Great for static content, but poor if you want high performance.

[SlvrCrb]

Witchfinder said:

I'm running a little web game at the moment: http://battles.interstellar-war.com Interstellar War: Fleet Battles has about 1500 unique active accounts and about 3,000,000 page impressions per month. One of my clients is kindly letting me host the game on his servers, but he'll soon be forced to boot me off as his commercial websites start to take off. I need to raise money for hosting costs to keep the game running. I am hoping to partially meet this cost with "Supporter Rewards" for people who donate to the game. Unfortunately, I know I can't rely on people for generosity, so I'll need advertising to supplement it. I've no idea where to begin with web advertising though. I've been developing web applications fo years, but I've never really run a website before. Any (sensible) suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Easy way to start is to open some affiliate accounts with websites such as tradedoubler.com, cj.com, affiliatewindow.co.uk etc. From there choose the closest advertisers to your user demographics and always use appropriate placement of ad content ( as a simple rule, text links in email, graphics for the site) and MEASURE. If for example you decide to place an somewhere advert on your site always split test it. i.e FOr every 100 impressions of a page, serve one type of ad for 50 visitors and serve another ad for the other 50 (use a php or perl script) Measure the conversion rates from one, compare to the other, bingo, best ad wins. Repaeat until you have equal measures of conversions. Same goes for email ads you send out, pay per click ads, any type of ads need to be measured against CPA and CPC to gather your ROI and therefore your break even.

>> Edited by SlvrCrb on Tuesday 21st February 23:46

[SlvrCrb]

Witchfinder said:

Google-ads scrape the site for content and start following links, which leads to funky things happening! We tried them and they were just too clever for their own good. Great for static content, but poor if you want high performance.

Agree on this. Fluff filler with appaling conversion rates.