Are custom ads possible and, if so, what’s the pricing?
Absolutely, and I have no idea. I imagine it would partly depend on who it’s for. I think it would be kind of cool to give free spots to members of the community in some cases, for example maybe let ElSapo have an ad for his writing. I like the idea of us using this platform to help ourselves and promote our own projects. I’d also be very much in favor of running free spots for causes we support.
For more straightforward commercial advertising, we’d need to figure out what sort of campaign it is and what rates are fair. CPM ads are sold in blocks, usually around $2 for 1,000 impressions. CPC ads pay per click, with rates all over the place. CPA ads pay per action, usually a completed sale, sometimes for a signup or simlar. They can pay by percentage or flat fee.
Our Amazon ads are CPA. The AdSense stuff we were running was a mix of all three, with most of it being CPC.
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Well, I do all kinds of shit and would maybe even run an ad for something semi-serious like doing a van conversion. I would want it to be cheap, but not free, and I wouldn’t want my many enemies to be able to spam me with clicks and run up my bill - so $/time.
Then you’d want a CPM campaign. You’d buy X number of spots to be delivered over Y time period. Then the software would figure out how often to insert them to meet those targets.
Cool, pricing discussion?
Would be more valuable if I could deliver ads only to likely van dwellers and I could customize ads towards users. Like Clovis would get ads like:
and well, if I were part of the target audience I would get ads like:
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Dunno, I want to say we should just run it for free, but I can tell you want to pay something.
How about if we offered everybody 1 free ad spot to do whatever they want with? skydiver can run one for Pete. boredsocial can use his to become a truck shipping magnate. Some people could list their favorite charity, or just be goofy.
We can geo-target (and device target), but we’re not doing any tracking that would give us those sorts of detailed demographics, and I would be very opposed to implementing it.
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I was really just joking about that. It would only work really if I could pick ads for people and not the algorithm.
Something like that would be good, I reckon.
I’d just throw out a suggestion for pricing and first month free etc, but I don’t have a good feel for the number of ads that would be delivered.
Bronze package X ads at $5-$10 per month
Silver ad package Y ads at $? per month
Gold package Z ads at $?? per month
(I only filled out the Bronze price range, because that’s about the amount I’m thinking.)
A price list like that would be good to have. I’ll need to get some better stats on how many ads we serve so the numbers make sense. We’re not currently showing anything at the top of list pages, and that’s where the majority of impressions were coming from when we did.
This is great. At first I thought the ads were a forum glitch.
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Yes. A couple of the spots in rotation are by keyword (which we can also choose), but the majority were specifically chosen by users. I’ve been meaning to hit up the book thread and ask for recommendations. Have a lot on my plate these days tho.
Cliffs for grunchers: Give me 4 links to products on Amazon and I’ll make an ad for them, with your name listed as the recommender. Alternatively, give me a keyword that yields good results.
Sounds awesome, and I think you might be our first official sale, too!
Also, for people who know URL-fu, if you stick &tag=unstuckpoliti-20 into any Amazon product link and paste it here you’ll create your own onebox ad that we also get a commission from if it generates a sale. It’s a great way to troll suzzer!
Amazon doesn’t pay out at all for clicks? Seems like it should even if you don’t buy, I’m a lot closer to buying something when I click an amazon link than I was going to whatever adsense was serving up.
No, they pay a commission on completed sales only, but also for anything else included in that order even if it wasn’t advertised. So if you decide to buy an item from an ad here and there are some other things you’ve been meaning to purchase as well, putting them all on the same order gets us a cut of the whole thing.
And while we’re on the topic of pay-per-click, if any of you ever tried to “help” a website by clicking on ads you otherwise wouldn’t, you should know that is spectacularly counterproductive and not actually helpful in any way at all. The people who do the paying for the clicking are very quick to suspend accounts when individuals are clicking at rates much higher than normal.
Zipper, buckles and shoelaces is lame, but this boot looks a lot better than anything suzzer’s been posting.
Since this thread’s getting bumped a bunch tonight I’ll mention that our application to be an iTunes affiliate was rejected. I think the phrase “politics forum” is going to be a tough sell for account applications that get reviewed by an actual human. Like whoever looked it over mashed the reject button so fast they sent the wrong form letter, then sent the correct one when I asked for clarification.
Sounds like a branding issue. Let’s ditch the politics and relaunch as “Unstuck Lifestyle”?
Don’t get me wrong, we keep the Narodnaya Volya vibe going, but only in a secondary politics category, maybe even make it invisible unless you reach a certain trust level. But the primary category should just be a potpourri of personal fitness blogs, cooking tips, and reviews of various boots and waxy leather jackets and such?
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Hm, if I buy a book through one of those links but buy it as a Kindle version (so, “buy with one click” rather than “add to cart”) is there still a cut for other purchases made (e.g. if I then add something to cart and check out with it)
Dunno. It’s all a black box, really. So far nothing has shown up at all and I’m not even sure what sort of details we get on the sales report.
Today’s report shows a completed sale and commission! Our take so far:
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Can you see what it was? I bought a kindle book (but didn’t test making another purchase afterwards). 52c isn’t bad kickback for a $15 purchase that I would have made anyways.