Re: Brother buys all of Smallbusinessdepot.com's ad space!

From: Janet Attard <attard_at_businessknowhow.com>
Date: Fri 20 Oct 2000 11:47:18 -0500

RAMON RAY <ramon_at_smallbiztechnology.com> WROTE:
> There's more juice (a lot of juice) in the pure
> "content" Web publishing industry bucket!
>
> On businesswire today, SmallBusinessDepot.com Signs
> First-Ever Total Site Sponsorship with Brother
> International Corp. (Business Wire)

You know, I saw that press release and I didn't see
anything unusual about it (except maybe that someone
sent out a press release saying they sold all their
inventory for a month ;)

Advertisers are out there. It's not at all unusual for
us to sell out all our inventory on our web site,
either. And, yes, for us, agencies have helped do that.
We also sell some of it ourselves and don't have an
outside sales force. Just having a good, niche content
site on the web has helped advertisers - or their
agencies - find us. And we get a decent fee for our
ads, so the site makes a small profit.

But the whole thing is a chicken and egg game. You need
a certain minimum number of impressions to get
advertisers (and different agencies or advertiser have
different minimums even in ad networks, apparently).
That's one big hurdle for sites starting out. Once you
get to the size that you can start attracting
advertisers, then the next big hurdle is growth - being
able to scale it all up and be able to make a big
profit. :) To do the things to bring in additional
traffic, and to then manage the additional traffic and
feed the whole monster (to keep new content coming so
people keep coming back day after day, week after week
and call over all their friends, too) is costly. While
ad revenues can help fund that effort and hopefully
will always be a major part of sites' revenue, I think
content sites need to have other ways of bringing in
income, too.

Janet Attard
Business Know-How(sm) http://www.businessknowhow.com
Author of The Home Office and Small Business Answer Book and of
Business Know-How: An Operational Guide for Home-Based and Micro-Sized
Businesses





Received on Fri Oct 20 2000 - 11:47:18 CDT