Most people in webcomicdom know, use and love Project Wonderful. This post is not about Project Wonderful. PW is AWESOME for the average webcomicker looking to advertise his or her comic on another web-page  (advertiser). It is not so awesome for the person trying to make money by publishing ads on his or her page (publisher).  In the rest of this article, please be aware that when I say “publisher,” I’m saying “person who publishes ads on his/her site.”

Some more terms:

CPM=Cost Per Thousand Ad Impressions (mille=thousand in French, guessing the acronym is related). This is the unit in which ads are sold through most publishers. You are paid by how many thousands of pageviews you provide. Normal market CPM is $2-4.00 US for webcomics.  In contrast, I’ve never advertised on PW for a CPM over 20 cents.

CPC=Cost Per Click. Some ad providers pay by the click. This directly relates to the performance of the ads on your site, obviously. It’s not recommended that you run CPC ads, as you will generally make less money than with CPM campaigns.

Fill Rate= # of ads shown/total # pageviews. Most ad providers do not guarantee a 100% fill rate, unlike Project Wonderful (if someone is bidding, they get that spot 100% of the time, until they cancel the bid or run out of funds).

Default= when an ad space is not filled on a pageview, it may be sent your default: either an image of your choice, or another ad network.

Ad Chain= you can set up different networks to default to other ad networks. When your fill rate is 10-20% per network, but you set up your ads in a chain, you make more money by filling default views.

—-

So, if I don’t champion Project Wonderful for the Publisher, what do I suggest?  There are lots of other advertisers out there that pay by CPM or CPC*  For this article, I am only going to talk about the ones I personally use, have set up for others, or have heard only praise for by others.  I am also going to stress that you should not take the step to applying to ad providers until your site is up to par! That means SEO, webcomic website must-have’s, should-have pages, reguarly updated content, and that’s just the beginning! You can find my articles on these things in the archives on this blog. Check the categories section in the side-bar!  If you do not do these things, your site’s application will be rejected, and you’ll have to wait a couple months to resubmit!

Okay, now that I’ve added my disclaimer, I can move on to where to go! I recommend starting first with ADSDAQ. This is a context-based ad provider, meaning it reads the text on your site, and serves you ads that have something in common with your readership.  If your site does not have a lot of readable text, your site will be rejected.  ADSDAQ is also nice because it provides you with simple codes to install on your site, as well as the freedom to set your desired CPM. This means that you may set a very high CPM (and have a lower fill rate), a very low CPM (and have a very high fill rate), or your perfect CPM (with a medium fill rate.)

I recommend ADSDAQ because it allows small sites to join. Webcomic sites, or any image-intensive sites, must be careful when applying.  Webcomics/graphics compete with ads on the page, so an application will be quickly rejected if competition is too high.

I personally make $40-50 dollars a month with ADSDAQ (more now that I’ve optimized my site) by displaying 2 ad sizes. That’s up to $600 a year, which ain’t a LOT, but it’s far more than I would make with PW at 50 cents a day.  I have a steady 15% fill rate at 2.00 CPM, and I get on average 100k pageviews a month. I’m trying to increase the fill rate to 20-30%, if not more.  The key to making money with ADSDAQ is increasing your fill rate, and it will depend on your site’s content, your desired CPM, and your total pageviews. I am currently experimenting with including more text about current television series such as Heroes, NCIS, CSI, etc, as well as new movie releases in order to increase fill rates. By doing this, I increase fill rates for ads that have more in common with my audience, for example, the Hellboy II campaign that was shown 2 weeks ago.

—

After applying to ADSDAQ, learning the ropes of being a publisher, and optimizing your site even more, apply to Burst Media.  Burst is harder to get into than ADSDAQ, and is not context based. Instead, it allows you to choose which ads (and what CPM) you want to display on your page out of a list.  It also requires that your audience fill out a survey in order to determine your site’s demographics. You need a minimum of 200 responses to get better fill rates, so make sure your audience is big enough!

Since you’re in 2 networks now, you can set up an ad chain so that unfilled impressions are sent to the second network. Which ever network makes you more money should be placed first! (D’uh, right!?) I have ADSDAQ defaulting to Burst.  Before joining Burst, I had ADSDAQ defaulting to Project Wonderful. Be aware that when doing this, the PW stats graph DOES NOT INCLUDE PAGEVIEWS WHEN IT IS NOT DISPLAYED. However, due to misconceptions about this, PW default ads perform poorly.  People do not like to bid on them.  The one exception I know is the tower on Roza and the Horse Prince.

—

After ADSDAQ and Burst, you’ll want to apply to networks like Tribal Fusion and Gorilla Nation.  These are the big guys, and they require a minimum amount of visitors, UNLIKE the previous 2 networks.  They are context-based networks also, GN more than TF.  My site is too small to be accepted here.  There are many other ad networks out there, but most, like Google Adsense, make zilch for the average webcomicker.  Since I have no experience with them, I won’t write about them.

What I HIGHLY recommend is advertising through Project Wonderful, and publishing through these other networks.  For a comparatively inexpensive price, you can greatly increase your pageviews, and make MORE money from publishing than you spent advertising.  I also know there are plenty of webcomics out there with significantly more readers than mine, webcomics that are simply better, but make no money.  THERE IS A WAY. If I can make $600 a year on a hobby, others can be making thousands, easily. This is entirely without merchandising, which is something I think webcomics should not pursue until they have a steady income though publishing ads. There is simply so much involved in designing good merchandise odds are you won’t do it right until you’ve had more experience in knowing WHAT SELLS, and that includes ads on your site.

—

Up next: Advertising 303: Generating Ad Revenue and How it Relates to Content (and therefore, SEO).  I touched on it today, but tomorrow will include examples, screen shots, etc.