NONE: Re: Ads on Lists
Re: Ads on Lists
Cliff Kurtzman (cliff.kurtzman_at_tenagra.com)
Sat, 29 Jun 1996 12:30:51 -0600
Michael Bledsoe, mbledsoe_at_halcyon.com wrote:
>
>Can a list with 1200 subscribers sell ads?
Most definitely. Even when this list was run by InterEdge and had under
600 subscribers, Kevin had sponsors for this list.
>1. Are there "agencies" which would sell the ads for me?
I know of none that do so. Widespread mailing list sponsorship is even
newer than web site sponsorship, and with only a few exceptions (e.g.
C|Net, WSJ) most mailing lists reach at most a few tens of thousands. That
small an audience does not command the tens of thousands of dollars a month
in fees that an ad on a high traffic web site will command.
>2. What is a reasonable rate to distribute the at to the 1200 subscribers one
>time?
Nothing approaching a standard exists for pricing mailing list
sponsorships. They are much less well defined than banner ad pricing.
"What the market will allow" is possibly the right answer.
One thing to keep in mind is that a mailing list subscriber is likely to be
significantly more qualified than a web site browser. The fact that
someone gives you permission to put mailings into their mail box tells you
they are very interested in the subject matter being discussed. I would
personally be willing to pay about 10 times as much per viewer to advertise
on a well run mailing list focused on a specific topic than I would be to
advertise on a web site devoted to the same topic.
I've developed some rough guidelines that I use for pricing mailing list
sponsorships. I don't yet know if my guidelines are at all typical, but
I'm happy to share them:
For one of my monthly e-zines (related to tennis), I price a sponsorship at
about 3 cents per subscriber. With 14,000 subscribers, that comes to about
$400 a month. Each sponsor gets a 35 line advertisement (45 lines if its
their first ad) in the monthly newsletter. I only allow ads related in
some way to tennis. With ads that large, people would probably get very
upset if they were off topic.
If someone wants to send a dedicated mailing to my tennis list apart from
my monthly e-zine, then I price it at 10 cents per subscriber or $1,400.
So far, I've never had anyone use this option, but it sure beats the cost
of postage, much less the costs of acquiring an emailing list of 14,000 who
are passionately interested in the subject of my list.
For an active discussion list or daily newsletter, the guideline I use is
on the order of 10 cents per subscriber per week. For your newsletter,
that would come to $120 per week. This is consistent with how Glenn
Fleishman priced sponsorships on the now defunct Internet-Marketing
discussion list. If you have a business-to-business application, you may
be able to command significantly higher rates.
Here is another data point: we recently received literature from Prodigy
for pricing on a "Prospect EMailing" to their subscribers. Mailings can be
targeted based on profiles that each subscriber fills out. Prodigy
publishes a rate of 35 cents per send for a dedicated targeted mailing (for
small mailings of under 150,000 recipients). That rate is much higher than
I have ever seen on the Net.
>3. Would the per-exposure rate be more or less if the list had 10K or 20K
>subscribers?
In general, I would expect it would be more for a smaller list. Your costs
per subscriber of running the list is probably much higher for a smaller
list, and your cost of acquiring and negotiating the sponsorship are a
fixed overhead regardless of list size. For small lists, you might come up
with a mimimum price below which it is simply not worth the bother, as I
have done with some of my lists.
>4. Do I need to have demographic info about the subscribers?
Well, you already know that your list subscribers are computer and Internet
literate, and interested in the subject matter of your list. That tells
you and advertisers a lot about them. However, it certainly wouldn't hurt
if you had more information, depending on who you think the target market
is to which you are trying to sell ads.
Note: I am also interested in how others price mailing lists sponsorships.
Because of the wide interest in this topic, I am collecting data for a
white paper I am writing on this subject. If any of our list members have
sponsored mailing lists and would like to be included in my report, please
email me at cliff.kurtzman_at_tenagra.com with the following information:
Name of list
How to subscribe
URL of list home page (if there is one)
Subject matter of list
Frequency of mailings
Number of subscribers
Price and terms of sponsorships
Anything else you think is important for me to know about your list.
My report will be freely available on the Web when completed. It is a good
opportunity to get publicity for your list if it is a sponsored one.
--Cliff Kurtzman, moderator
The Tenagra Corporation
http://arganet.tenagra.com/
713/480-6300
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