NONE: Doubleclick + IMGIS: Revenues and Ethics
Doubleclick + IMGIS: Revenues and Ethics
David H Dennis (david_at_amazing.com)
Tue, 2 Jul 1996 10:22:45 -0700 (PDT)
I have a massive web site, including resources as different as the
Internet Access Provider FAQ and Wonderful Women of the Web. Bet you
can guess what gets the most hits! At this point, I'm running into
some financial storm clouds, and feel that it might make sense to make
some money by accepting advertising on my popular sites.
So I've been talking to a bunch of companies that offer to do this.
What they say is that they will do a sophisticated demographic analysis
of traffic to your site. I guess this means that if someone goes to
HotWired, fills out their survey telling them their income and what-not,
when that same surfer drops by my site, IMGS or Doubleclick's high-powered
computers query the browser or the IP address or something, look for an
appropriate advertiser in their database, and display it.
Then they pay me 25% - 70% of the take, depending on my volume of
eligible hits. This can be between roughly .05 for a "generic" hit
and $ 0.55 for a very specialized hit. So I could make from $ 0.0125
and $ 0.1375 per hit. (The number of hits needed to go above the
25% rate is prohibitive for a small or medium-sized site; it's Netscape
and Yahoo that get the big rates).
Unfortunately, they won't pay me for /all/ the hits I get, just for
ones that satisfy their criteria. What they tell me is that I can
write a perl script or C program that queries their server, comes up
with a Yes or no, and shuttles the hit over to a lower profit site
like the Commonwealth Network if it doesn't satisfy their standards.
I'm worried about two things, and I'd like your opinions:
- The fact that they claim to get demographics from visitors to my
site seems rather scary and 1984-ish. I'm not sure if I want to
subject the hapless visitors to my site to that sort of thing.
If my visitors realized what these companies were doing, I wonder
if they wouldn't take it out on my site.
- It strikes me that, since they're taking the lion's share of the
revenues, I might be better off selling the space myself. I'm
thinking seriously about starting up my own network that would
take this from my sites and funnel them into web pages that I've
designed for people. Thus, I'd get all the profits from the
sites.
I received a spam from a company called Admasters not too long ago.
They promised to come up with an network similar in principle to this.
But I haven't heard from them in a while, and their domain name seems
to no longer be served. Anyone know what happened to them?
Opinions, thoughts, ideas? Any thoughts on how I /should/ be selling
space?
D
