How do I price banner ads on my photography site?

I have a small photography website J Layes Photography.com that has galleries and allows visitors to buy prints of my photographs. I have been approached by a company asking whether I'd allow them to post their advertising banner on my site and how much I would charge. Now, I don't have any idea about online advertising and the costs and what I could charge for it. Could you please advise?

Dave's Answer:

At one level, the value of an advertisement is always defined by that old economics chestnut whatever the market will bear. That is, if your site is sufficiently popular with the right demographic that advertisers will pay $10,000/month for a slot, well, that's your proper price point.

That's not easy to figure out, of course, though we can get some basic quantitative data from scrounging around on the Web, including inbound links, PageRank, Alexa rating etc. Those all help you get a picture of how popular a site is and how "authoritative" it is in its own marketplace or niche. A site with low traffic but links from top, highly-respected sites, for example, would have a high PageRank from Google's algorithm, even though its Alexa rating would be low.

Fortunately, however, you saved me the bother by sending me some basic data on your site: "I have RSS feed on it as well as del.icio.us bookmarks. At the moment it has unique visitors, depending of the month, of up to 200 per month."

Based on that, I would say that you are extraordinarily lucky to have a company seeking a link on your site at all: 200 unique visitors per month translates to less than ten per day, and even if your advertiser has the most unbelievably effective advert that's going to garner 10% clickthrough, and they can generate sales to 10% of their visitors, that still means you'll help them sell two products per month max.

Nonetheless, they came to you, so you clearly can charge them. Your PageRank is 2/10, which is quite low, your traffic level is low, and according to a quick Google search, your inbound link count is zero (after this posting, it'll be up to one, at least).

I would suggest that you ask for $50/month for the advertisement and don't be surprised if they come back and offer you $25 or even $20 for a month's worth of visibility on your site. The important thing to remember is that it's always better than zero, and even $25/month across a year can buy you a new lens or other gear, all because you have a Web site. Pretty sweet, I'd say.

Good luck. Let us know what you asked, what they offered and what you settled upon for the advertisement.

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Comments

In this kind of situation, the blogger is usually afraid that he'll name a figure that's too high--and then he'll be sure that if he said ten bucks a month less he would've had a customer.

What would be a help would be a voluntary reporting Web site (anonymous) where bloggers who sell ads talk about their traffic and the rates they get. I think more than a few bloggers would be willing to pay for such a site.
--Mike

Posted by: Michael A. Banks at October 27, 2007 5:28 PM

Your site has very useful information. Thanks for all the efforts.

Posted by: Ajay at November 4, 2007 2:35 PM

I have this website called www.crowdnow.com. I am trying to subscribe to some banner ads service. Is there a service out just like adsense who would spit out banner ads based on the content on our site ?

Posted by: Kiran at January 23, 2008 6:02 PM

Hi Dave, Im a graphic designer.. I have a project which is make a advertising banner on website, the problem is.. I dont know how much I would charge my client. This is kind a new project for me, can you please give me an advise? Thanks

Posted by: ode at April 22, 2009 5:26 AM

I would like to replace my google banners with a different Corporate Cruise Line banner on the bottom of each of my pages (they choose each itinerary site and may have one banner per page on each site). That means they will be represented on just about every port desitnation in the world. I plan to approach each cruise line company with this idea. However, I do not know what to charge. What would one banner per site (and I plan to add hundreds of destination cruise ports = Northern Europe, Western Med & Atlantic Islands, Hawaii, Eastern Mediterranean, Mexico---along with the Eastern & Southern Caribbean cruise ports, and Bermuda that I have already established. I already have traveled to all of these countries and have many valuable photos and information from each port.
I want to keep my pages visual and clean. I want them to be artistic and inticing to travelers. I do not use a template for that reason.
I have just begun 6 months ago and I get many hits from Googlers and others daily. I can do a destination a month--so I have a lot of work before me!
Any suggestions that you can give me would be appreciated. I even thought of a trade: one free cruise per year per cruise line so that at least I can keep the sites updated.. along with enjoying my work!

Posted by: Sunny at May 26, 2009 10:52 AM

Sorry to rain on your parade, but I don't think you're going to be able to sell CPM advertising (that is, pay for visibility) to cruise lines. You'll do better to have an affiliate relationship where you get paid a % of bookd tickets for people who book a cruise having clicked through from your ads. Good luck either way!

Posted by: Dave Taylor at May 27, 2009 10:51 AM

i am about to start a website based on all insurance products available in the market. i am expected to get a traffic of 1000 unique visitors from the first day itself which will gradually increase day by day. my website is based in india.
pls guide me in how much to charge from advertisers for cpm

Posted by: kashyap at September 8, 2009 11:05 AM

Hello,
Can anyone tell me how log does it normaly take to ge a page rank,my website is only 3 months old.
Thanks

Posted by: Colin Perman at May 1, 2010 1:07 PM

Hello Dave. I started a website promoting my small English cafe business and I wanted this site to help English learners giving them suggested websites to study from and to give them some of my own material to study from. The only way I was advertising it was through the flyers I was posting up around the city. Im really not sure how to create more traffic to the site. How do I get it to come up when you search " English Cafe" on say google? I really need some help. Thanks a lot

Posted by: James at October 11, 2010 8:46 AM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!