the tool seems nice and I think I heard of it before. Is it only 6 months old? I am surprised you don't make more than 1k/month.

I think it's a nifty tool but you need to find a better way to describe what it is and what it does.

> I'm not taking anything from you because you gave it to me for free

logical fallacy. You took it for free, but it had a price. If the ad has a $3 RPM it means you seeing the ad pays $0.003 to the content producer.

The price was just to let that ad load. not even to watch it or to read it.

It was free for you because you took it, by using a browser extension that lets you watch the site in a different way than the one that was intended.

in which direction ?

and how is it going?

the idea of internal tagging to start having a better idea of impressions is good.

I'll have our developer work on it.

The problem here is that the company we work with has access to the big names in the industry. Having their ad campaigns on our sites actually adds credibility to the sites themselves.

But I might start looking into cutting my middleman and going to the advertisers directly.

Hey - thanks for the answer.

We do receive approximately 1M pageviews a month - with usually 2-3 ads per page.

The company who does the selling now has a sales funnel that we cannot match. Close relationships to big companies to whom they sell very relevant campaigns.

This said, we make approximately $2/3,000 per month with advertising.

I believe it's really small. They say it's because half of the pageviews are on mobile so many of their ads don't show.

Even this considered, I am growing tired of having that revenue amount as my only benchmark. I have been asking for detailed reporting for months and have not received any...

Regarding the choice - why no DFP? It seems to be the easiest one.

I presume that the content on your website is somewhat NSFW, otherwise you would be using Google Adsense or media.net to server the adverts. They give full reports, pay well, and in my experience pay higher for mobile browsers.

You say that they send you a cheque, with no breakdown of figures. This seems almost unbelievable to me.

not NSFW at all! Actually our advertisers are as Top100 as they come!

Adsense was not really performing that well when we made the switch, but even after the switch to the new provider - we haven't experienced the highs we were hoping for.

But yes, the company who manages our inventory is quite respected in the industry we are in - simply horrible with their reporting for our figures.

And yes, no breakdown of figures. I guess this is the wake up call i needed to either start receiving reporting, or sever our relationship.

thanks

Would like to learn about company that can pay better than adsense on regular basis. I am reading this first time.

Edit: I would suggest you to give one more try to adsense, it might perform better this time.

It's an agency. They have actual sales people who have relationships with the companies and sell them ad campaigns on individual sites (in a certain niche).

Thanks, got it, niche is the keyword here.

So why not send your mobile traffic to Google Adsense, and the normal traffic to your current ad provider.

Because I have an exclusive agreement with that agency. It's obvious now after reading some of these answers that i need to review my agreement with them

nice book idea! If I had any time on top of job, side project and family i'd buy it!

question. I see you use Gumroad. Reasons not to go with Clickbank? No need for affiliates?

I will be counter-intuitive here and ask you this.

Is the domain worth 20k for you? If it is, and you think in the long run it will add 20k to your bottom line, then buy it.

If for any reason the startup won't succeed (knock on wood), if that is an appetizing enough .com, it will still be worth its asking price.

I recently read the examine.com guys bought it for 42k. I thought that was a very big risk for a starting blog. But in fairness, i think a domain name like examine.com could be re-sold for a very similar amount in short time.

If you think the .com is not worth 20k for you, or if you don't have 20k - then go for a prefix/suffix.

Buy cheap brand PPC campaigns on Googlee for your brand (I assume the parked domain isn't doing it) so that when people Google the name, they get to you. And eventually if you have constant Ads on top, and your site has a content as opposed to a parked domain,it will rank better in google too.

We can put 20k on a domain name if we really want to.

But from my experience, a domain name is a domain name and it's usually not worth that much of the money. 20k can be spent in a marketing campaign that will out weigth the benefits of having the "pure" .com

That's a bit simplistic.

Having "Examine.com" as our brand brought us weight - the domain is easy to remember, easy to understand, has a link to what we're selling, and so forth.

BUT - that 42k was never all we had. It was maybe ~25% of what we had. We decided that the brandability of the domain was more important than buying ads.

As you have a SaaS business, buying ads may work out. On the other hand, having a non-.com may backfire.

YMMV.

Hi, www.runningshoesguru.com here, 500k visits/month.

My suggestion is to go for the blue ocean. Either blog in a sphere that is not crowded, or be significantly different than any existing player.

Easier said than done maybe, but have a goal in mind and strive to be the absolute best. I dont agree with the "just write".