??? Questions to Ad Buyers...

From: Fred Showker <tips_at_photoshop911.com>
Date: Thu 01 Nov 2001 20:20:54 -0500

Greetings...

Are there people on this list who BUY advertising?
(Seems to be only those who SELL advertising.)

I know the SELLERS aren't going to part with their
hard earned experience, and rightly so.

But if there are ad buyers on the list, we'd like
to know what really floats your boat?

We need a little help in wording our media kit.
This will be our FIRST ever media kit after seven
successful years online as an "ad free" dot-com.

??? What offering (product) in a web site is MOST
    attractive to advertising buyers? Is "numbers"
    all there is?

??? Who's "Insertion Order" takes precedence?
    The advertisers' or the web site's advertising
    policy?

??? Should we waste our time on 'non-standard' product
    offerings like 'Advertorials' and in-page 'ROP'
    space? (Seems most we've talked to aren't even
    interested if it's not a standard banner -- but in
    reality they're the least effective compared to the
    conversion rates of tightly targeted advertorials.)

We only recently started actually looking at the stats
of the site, and discovered that within a week of running
a review of a new book (directly targeted at our readers)
we had sold 600 copies through Amazon.

I realize that 600 "clicks" isn't much to brag about, and
we would surely starve selling those 600 clicks at
15-cents each. but when you consider it was a $49.99 book,
THAT'S $ 29,994.00 in book sales that the publisher would
have paid only $90 for.Had they paid for the spot.

(There were another 1,100 clicks from people who didn't
buy, but doesn't that compute to about a 30% conversion
rate? How do you figure "conversion" rates?)

But doesn't it also seem a bit upside-down?
Our Amazon commissions on that particular book were only
30 bucks. The sad part is, the "Editor's Choice" is a
monthly column which generates no revenue other than the
Amazon commissions.

It's sort of becoming discouraging. It happens just about
every time we post a new "Editor's Choice" book, and
somehow there should be some way to make a little more
from our well-read, and highly trusted editorial content.
Many readers have been with us since the late 1980s when
the zine first was published on Compuserve, GEnie and then
later on AOL.

Thanks for reading

Fred Showker

Editor/Publisher: DT&G Magazine

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Received on Thu Nov 01 2001 - 19:20:54 CST