Hey guys,
Those are some really wise words I think from MannyF. This is a good time for us to look at why we contribute to the site. Its for personal enjoyment and the satisfaction of building a community who enjoy the same thing.
I am glad that we’re able to bring some money in as a side benefit… mostly because it will help remove a financial burden from those who have picked up costs associated with the site.
I suspect that there is more value in our lovely site than what we may think.
I mentioned I was going to speak to colleagues who work in this advertising space and here is what I’ve learned:
Most of the value for ads come from two aspects:
- How much traffic you get
- How targeted the advertising will be (how specific is the audience)
On the traffic front advertisers are interested in # of page views, # of unique visitors, # of hits. Sites that get visitors to stay for a long time and bring in new visitors regularly can charge more for space. Our site has fairly low traffic. In comparison, yojoe.com claims to have 100,000 page views daily vs our 1,700. They run a 480 x 60 banner ad, and I’ve submitted a request to get their advertising rates to see what they charge.
On the ‘targeted’ front you can’t get much more specific than a ThunderCats fan web site for a company interested in popular toy characters like CSG. The fact that we can place ads on our toy section and forums really raises the value of overall advertising also.
My colleagues estimation of our value based on traffic and specificity is about $1,000 a year for a permanent banner on the main page. It would be even more if we included CSG in our actual content pages and if we included the banner in more than one place on the site.
I’d say though that given that nobody else has offered more than CSG and this is more than we’d currently earn from the amazon ads or potentially the google ads (though i don’t know) … we should accept this offer with the understanding that it isn’t exclusive and either side can cancel the contract at the end of each quarter.
We should definitely find a way to track how many click-throughs we get from the banner, because this is the single most important statistic to CSG and other potential advertisers at the end of the day. If this number is high then CSG will want to repeat their ad placement with us.
My thoughts on what to do with advertising money
I think that whatever MannyC and MannyF are out of pocket for on the 2 years of hosting they paid up on should be repaid from this revenue.
The balance of money left over should be put aside for future costs related to improving the site or looking after higher bandwidth costs if/when the traffic jumps around movie time.
If at some point we have excess funds, we could consider doing some of the following things:
- more giveaways / prizes for competitions to site members
- buying team t-shirts
- promoting the site on the web and in print
- purchasing exclusive content for the site
- site database set up or maintenance
Like MannyF said, let’s not get overly excited about the fact that money is on offer to the site. Let’s tread slowly and see how this goes with CSG and lets just learn as we go along. Thanks to MannyC for organizing all of this, it is a real pat on the back for all of our combined efforts… the site is getting noticed and that’s great. Main thing is that we’re having fun building this thing together.
Cheers all round team!
Mark
I agree, Mark might be the man in the know as I think he deals with this sort of stuff in his professional life - here’s hoping we can get a good price from them! 
