I originally planned for part two of this series to be about CSS and HTML, but after reading through some comments and questions on various forums around the Interwebs, I realized that advertising might be the most under-utilized aspect of webcomic sites. As I scour through various sites, I notice an overwhelming number of people rely on some of the worst-paying ad networks and ad sizes available to a site owner.

First the basics. Do you want to run ads and find a way to monetize your webcomic? Great! There are dozens (if not hundreds) of good options available to you as a site owner. Don’t want to run ads? Well then, you’re probably reading the wrong blog.

Most popular ad sizesWhat size ads to run?
The general rule is this: rectangles (300×250 being the most common size) pay the best, leaderboards (728×90) pay second best (though they can sometimes rival rectangles in price and are much easier to fit in the header of a site), and skyscrapers (160×600) are third on the list. For the sake of convenience, I’m going to pretend other ad sizes don’t exist and I’ll focus on the three most commonly-used ad sizes available from almost any ad network. Have you wondered why your skyscraper ad doesn’t pay out as well as you’d like? Well, it’s probably because that ad size is a pretty distant third to the rectangle and leaderboard ad sizes. But don’t think that I’m discounting skyscraper ads entirely; they are a very good solution for sidebars and other content that consume a lot of vertical space. But all things being equal, you should push for both rectangles and leaderboards before you consider a skyscraper ad space.

I’ll also say this: if you’re going to run ads on your website, design your website to accommodate ads, not the other way around. Find space for leaderboards and rectangles, put at least one ad above the fold (more on the reasons for that later), and re-evaluate what you’re trying to accomplish with your site and how to attain that goal. Cramming ads into already-open spaces may be convenient and easy but it will rarely achieve the desired goal of turning your webcomic into a profitable enterprise (is that even possible?).

Where do I find good ad networks?
This is no easy task. Everyone has their own opinions on who pays the best, who delivers the most consistent ads, etc. etc. etc. The honest answer is that there is no answer. Every ad network has its strengths and weaknesses. Some might play really well into a site about hockey, another might fit better with a site about sewing, continue ad nauseum. Experimentation is the name of the game in ad delivery. Try a bunch of ad networks out. Sure, it might cost you a few bucks in the short-term but once you find the network that caters to your specific needs the best, you’ll make far more money than if you chose the first network that accepted you and stuck with that for all your ads.

The one thing I’ve noticed that, in my mind, is without question is that Project Wonderful pays the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel of all ad network choices. The typical payouts are so abysmal that it’s funny (albeit in a very sad way). On the other hand, that makes Project Wonderful a fantastic place to buy your ads. Maximize the strengths of each network; in the case of Project Wonderful, that means avoiding it at all costs to deliver ads on your site while using it extensively to promote that same site. Why does PW pay so miserably? Well, I don’t know for sure but given the fact that most of the advertising on the network is purchased by independent creators, I speculate that nobody has enough money to make it competitive. Joe Schmoe promoting his 50,000 pageview a month comic is not going to have 1/1,000,000th of the purchasing power of Ford or Pepsi.

To give an example: I co-own a pretty large baseball website with several writers (unsurprisingly, they keep me around as the tech dweeb, nothing more). This site ranges between 500,000 and 800,000 page views a month. From only the ad network we use to deliver ads, we receive well over $10,000 a year in advertising (more if you include direct advertising but we’ll talk about that later). The site delivers roughly 4.3 ads per page (high but not unusual for a site that delivers a huge number of forum views). Using the baseline of 500,000 pageviews a month divided by 30, the site tallies about 16,500 page views a day. Not that large a number, right? Except that when you factor in the $10,000 we make a year from ad network revenue, that comes to $28 a day. Divide that by 4 (roughly the number of ads we serve per page), and we’re making close to $7 per ad space per day. Normalize those numbers to match our “real” traffic averages and we make closer to $8 per ad space per day. Match it with a recent restructuring of ad tags to focus on content-driven ads, popular sizes, and placement, and this year we’re approaching $9 per day per ad tag.

I compared that to Project Wonderful earlier today, looking around for sites that netted somewhere in the vicinity of 25,000 page views a day (well above the numbers used for my own site traffic in this example). I didn’t find a Project Wonderful ad that would cost me more than $2 to buy for the day, with most ads coming in somewhere around a buck for the day. That’s what I’m paying for that Project Wonderful ad, not what the site owner receives after the ad network takes a cut. Yikes, right? That means my ads are generating somewhere between 300-800% of the revenue of your typical Project Wonderful ad.

Ready to rethink your choice of ad networks yet?

project-wonderfulRPM vs. CPC
RPM (revenue per mille) and CPC (cost per click) are the two methodologies most ad networks pay out for their publishers. RPM ads are based purely on impressions. You deliver more ads, you receive more money. CPC ads are based on the number of click-throughs that ad generates from your site. The more your users click on an ad, the more money you get paid for that ad. These two ad systems are radically different and you need to take into account many things to decide which system is better for you. Are your ads well-placed and do they generate a ton of clicks? CPC should work well for you if that’s the case. Are your ads placed less than ideally in some spots but overall, your site garners enough traffic to offset that fact? Then RPM might be the way to go for you (and in many cases, it’s a good idea to use both!). In my experience, RPM networks tend to pay considerably better than their CPC counterparts (excepting Project Wonderful, which is a weird version of an RPM network). On the flip side of that coin, RPM networks often have a traffic floor for their publishers, and that floor is often in the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of page views per month.

So that means most of us will be stuck with at least some CPC network ads. That means design is of the utmost importance when placing your ads. To get the most clicks, you want your ads front and center. Put them in highly-visible locations on your site (at least one “above the fold”, meaning a user will see the full ad without scrolling upon entering your website). Design the content to incorporate your ads the best you can. If possible, put ads in the content where your users are looking at the page. To maximize a CPC network, you need to drive click-throughs first and foremost, which probably means a re-thinking of how you design and interact with your website. There are many solutions to achieving this goal and I suggest spending a lot of time browsing the Internet looking at popular sites like Engadget, Huffington Post, etc. to see how they incorporate advertisements. Do not visit comic sites to get ideas on ad placement! Remember that most comic creators are all in the same boat, trying to do the best they can but they are not professional designers who run multi-million dollar websites. Learn from the pros, not the guy down the street building websites in his garage on nights and weekends.

And no matter which service you use, remember to utilize the ad sizes that pay out the most (generally rectangle then leaderboard then skyskraper) and my statements in part one of this series that “less is more”. The less stuff you have cluttering up your website, the more likely a user is to click on that item. This also applies to advertising, particularly in CPC-based networks. If you have dozens of items cluttering up your screen, the chances a user will click on that ad (and therefore, earn you money) decreases with each additional widget and box you load onto the site. Prioritize your goals and get rid of that superfluous crap that both deteriorates your user experience and reduces your click-through return rates.

Backup Ads
Remember that you are not constrained by using only one ad company. For most of my personal sites (pretty low traffic, barring the baseball site), I use 2-3 networks per site. I mix and match depending on that particular site and what network works best under those specific conditions. Another option that is offered by some companies (PulsePoint, for example) is the “backup ad tag”. You run the PulsePoint ad tag but in the control panel settings of PulsePoint, you can specify a secondary ad network to use when PP can’t deliver an ad for that space. You can also enable similar functionality through Google DFP, which I’ll talk more about in a bit. At no point should you have an ad tag that is not delivering an ad. You want as close to a 100% fill rate as possible.

Ad Serving
One of the more advanced, but highly recommended, methods of ad delivery is the use of an ad server system. Instead of plugging ad tags directly into your WordPress template, you place generated tag code from a system like Google DFP (free to use!). This allows you a ton of flexibility when serving ads, as you can schedule different ads, rotate through ads that promote your personal projects (are you hosting a KickStarter? Might be a good idea to wipe out network ads and use that space to advertise that while it’s running), and generally just allow you more fine control over your advertisement tags. Google DFP has a bit of a learning curve but mostly, it works like a standard ad network (in place of network tags, you generate “inventory tags” which you plug into your site) with the added features of scheduling and easy rotation of advertisements. I could spend an entire blog writing solely about Google DFP; if you have questions on the service, feel free to ask away and I’ll answer the best I can but since it’s a rather advanced step in advertising, I figure many of you won’t want to start off using the service.

google-dfpDirect Advertising
When you get to this point, you’ve hit the jackpot of Internet advertising. Companies that buy into site “takeovers” (basically, consuming every ad you have on the site) pay big money to do it, sometimes to the tune of $10-15 per 1,000 impressions depending on ad size. Naturally, companies don’t do this unless your site is respected enough and well-trafficked enough to warrant such a purchase. If you’re one of the few site owners who are lucky enough to have such a large fanbase with hundreds of thousands of pageviews per month, I highly suggest doing Internet searches for local advertising agencies that deal directly with large ad buyers. Sure, that ad agency will take up to 50% of the revenue from that ad buy but the gross sale is so much higher than anything you’d get from a network that it’s a no-brainer. Once I hooked up with a local ad agency, it changed my frickin’ life (and the revenue generated by my website).

Additional Notes
Something else worth mentioning is that some ad networks (Project Wonderful again, argh) pay out revenue in PayPal dollars. This is bad. The better ad networks, while maintaining a minimum payout threshold ($100 in the case of Adsense), pay directly into your bank account. What does this mean? Well, it means you won’t get slapped with a 3% surcharge from PayPal. That may not seem like a lot of money but if you build a site that earns you $200 a month from ads, that’s about $75 you’ll be giving PayPal per annum. $75 is 20+ copies of your book to sell at cons. $75 goes a long way toward Facebook advertising to establish your brand. It’s nothing to scoff at and pennies can add up in the long term.

Resources to Get You Started
Google Adsense – doesn’t pay great in most cases but it’s still better than PW and is a good place to get your feet wet
Pulsepoint – pays a little better than AdSense but doesn’t deliver ads 100% of the time so you’ll need to use ad backup tags
Tribal Fusion – pays great but you need 500,000 unique visitors a month to qualify (gulp)
ValueClick Media – the rare bird of ad networks that allows low-traffic sites to host RPM-based advertising
Burst Media – no experience with these folks but it’s a UK-based ad network for those of you cozily residing just off the coast of the Continent
Project Wonderful – don’t use this service, seriously… only click this link to close out your ad tags
Google DFP – a great ad serving system that is FREE

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