Over the past good years, myriads of posts have been centered with the topic of making money through banner advertising or simply just any type of advertising. Way back from the dot com boom where startup companies were spending lucratively on banner advertisements, from the emergence of blogs and Google Adsense to the last years recession and now today, it seems like so many people just like to talk about banner advertising and their obnoxious take on it.
Initially it was the BEST way to make money online. I mean all you need to have is a web property, a topic and surely you can find some sort kind of sponsors to pay off your living. From there on, you’ll wait for them to get bankrupt and after that you chase for another sponsor. That’s the way it used to be before until big and small companies realized its all overhyped. And from there on some pundits started writing how making money through advertising is overrated and not for everyone. And until the day I write this post. 😉
Why it’s Overrated?
So to tackle it equally in both sides I decided to discuss it separately. Overrated is define as something that’s highly “perceived” as effective yet in reality its not (or maybe thats just the way I define it). Profiting from advertising is overrated because:
- It’s very hit and miss – In my blog post about how I doubled my blog advertising income, I concluded everything by saying that advertising income is still very hit and miss. What I mean there is that you can never expect to duplicate the same amount of money or more that you made last month to the current or succeeding months to come. It’s hard to rely on sponsors every month and expect they could pay all your bills.
- It’s hard and impossible for an average guy to make a living from it – Advertising is good however, if you’re just like most of us who don’t get millions of hits then its hard to squeeze a lot of money from it. As David Risley stated, if you compare a blog with 1000 visitors trying to make money solely from ads from a blog with 500 readers that is selling something, it’s obvious that the latter one is more profitable. Again, unless you are a site like YouTube, its nearly impossible to live off that advertising income.
- Couldn’t be even considered as a business model – This is true. I mean where’s the business in there? All you have to do is set up ad inventories and or use third-party advertising networks. You’re really not doing anything aside from copying and pasting codes and setting up ads so I don’t consider it a business model.
Why it’s Underrated?
Now let’s tackle it from the other side of the fence. Many people nowadays seemed to be so prolific in bashing making money from ads. If you read a lot, then you know what I’m talking about. Profiting from advertising is underrated because:
- It’s the pioneer of making money while sleeping (passive income) – Although nowadays there are many ways to make money passively, banner advertising probably is the pioneer of that. From the dot com boom days up to now, if you have a good web property then you can literally set it and forget it. Big sites like Cheezburger can literally not work for one month and I could assure you they would still be making the same amount of revenue from banner advertising. How’s that as an autopilot thing?
- Duh! It’s easy – Totally easy that even a man that came from some random cave could literally do it. We heard a lot about selling your own product or having a membership but those things are not for everyone. While on the other hand, trying to profit from Google ads or some other forms of advertising are definitely doable by any average Joe.
- You just need traffic and nothing else – In modern blogging, we all know that it’s all about building relationships. After building it, you can funnel it and then later on sell your stuff to them or promote affiliate offers. So with that, it means more than just getting traffic. When you’re profiting though from advertising, all you need is traffic (albeit massive traffic). You don’t need to respond to the comments, you don’t need to watch things closely or whatever. Just the traffic, and you’re living off that traffic.
To end this post, I hope i was able to give each argument a fair explanation on why they’re the best thing ever or not. If you ask me about my personal opinion, I would say banner advertising is still something thats worth looking at not just now but for 10-20 years to come.
Yes I can sell a product or a membership site but I can do that with ads on my sidebar right? Since I have the traffic, why not leverage it more? How about you, what do you think?
I have tested a lot of ads on my blogs, and my experience is that it’s hard to sell anything just based on the ads alone. I get a lot of clicks every single day for the various banners in my sidebar, but almost no sales. It might be because the sales page is bad, but I don’t think so.
There are two things; first, it’s easy to get people to click, but in order to get them to buy, we need to use a squeeze page and collect their email and then follow up. Second, sales are based upon trust. Almost every time I buy, I buy because the product was recommended to me by someone or a company that I trust.
Now, it’s probably easier to earn money by putting ads in the sidebar that are not based upon actual sales but direct advertising for people who will pay you monthly 🙂
That’s just my experience.
I think the banner ads is still a good tool to make money from blog. I usually use my banner space to promote my affiliate venture as well as my own product so it gives a good result of earning.
i do not think there is any thing wrong in making money through ads…as a blogger it is my discretion what i put in my blog..
It’s a fine balance to try and make money from ads. In particular, I feel that ads for the most part give the visitor a negative experience and may in the long run turn people off from your blog, especially if there are too many ads. The huge blogs get continuous new traffic from search engines and may not need the visitor retention as much as the smaller blogs.
But I think the smaller blogs may benefit more from targeting their audience more with good content and product recommendations rather than from ads. I think this way would get better audience retention.
Interesting. I have an interesting result for this as well. You’re right, promoting affiliate products in sidebar yield very little to no result at all. However, those affiliate products that don’t sell something but instead put them into an opt-in work very well for me. It’s not like I get a lot of money from it but I could say its at least worth it since people are getting converted into leads as opposed to just nothing.
In your second point yes. Advertisers know that the clickthroughs would be pretty low but I;m under assumption that they are doing this for branding more than anything so they still pay even when they don’t get much conversion.
I think its mixed for most people. Like Jens said above, some of the affiliate products being promoted in form of banners don’t really convert well if you compare it to advertisers paying you a fixed amount per month.
Like Richards said, I think that this all depends on what kind of traffic and web property do you have.
On small blogs it’s usually best if you start building some kind of email list and try to sale other products then send away your few visitors for a couple of cents. But if you have a website that has heaps of traffic and it doesn’t convert well or they are not very responsive to your emails. Then you can leverage some of it through ads, thus even if the visitors go an never came back you still got something.
Just my thought.
I place default aff. banners on my sidebar area and don’t remove them because ‘I think” it looks good. lol. if I would be creating optin pages (and email campaigns) for all of them like what you guys are suggesting here it would take up a lot of work. but it really sounds like the best thing to do so I have to say WHAT AN AWESOME IDEA. 🙂
btw melvin, you may want to checkout this bug I found on melvin blog: http://i54.tinypic.com/2em3nmv.png
I just want to add: if I were an advertiser who’s looking to promote my brand inside a Bloggers Blog, I , I would say that a Sponsored blog post review is the best option I’ll take rather than banner advertising.
If I had a blog with 5000 visitors per day, I would have focused more on banner advertising and content advertising more. Since that’s not the case, I would rather focus on various online marketing methodologies to make money. And that’s what is working now.
Right but I also think its just about making your readers get used to it. Most of the top bloggers have been running ads forever and it seems to be just fine with their gazillion of audience.
But good idea!
Hi Melvin!
I think banner ads still have their bite. I only place quality affiliate product ads which I have tested, so I know my readers gets the best quality product if they happen to buy.
i still love banner ads. It works well with me.
Hi Melvin
This is my first visit to your site.
I don’t have any ads on my sites because I don’t have much traffic on my blog yet. I am properly going to give it a try at some point so I am glad to learning something about it from this post and for the people commenting here on this post.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge on this matter.
I have done some research on this issue and find out that ads charging around $0.35 to %0.50 per 1000 imp work better and get sold easily too , if you have a quality blog .
I’m even thinking if i should put out a banner advertisement. Aside from that I’m thinking of how much I would sell it for. The space is currently being held by a google ad leaderboard.
Oh well I’m gonna advertise it for a 2 week trial. I hope someone buys that ad space. If not I’m gonna loose revenue coming from google ads clicks