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Essentials of a typical Advertising Rate Card

I started getting direct advertisers on this blog about two years ago. The other blogs just followed suit. It was an exciting prospect because the growing interest in blog advertising was something that popped out of nowhere. One of the best ways to prepare yourself for direct advertisers is to come up with an ad rate card.

About 13 months ago, I shared a sample of my rate card here. You can still download a copy of the file here. It’s an old one and I’ve actually updated that one into a new PDF file (which needs another round of updates because of the redesign). Essentially, there are 3 basic parts that you should include in your rate card and we’ll tackle each one of them.


Introduction & Profile.

Introduce your blog to your advertiser. They may already have a good overview of what your blog is all about but it will be great if you can highlight some of you blog’s nicer points. That might include a list of previous advertisers, features or mentions of your blog by mainstream media and a little bit more backgrounder. This will set the tone on how valuable advertising on your site in terms of visibility or exposure.

Stats, stats, stats.

This is where you show off your market reach. Site statistics is essential because it shows your advertisers how much they’re getting in return for the ad dollars they spend on your blog. You will need to show your daily uniques visitors, pageviews, traffic sources (direct, referral, search engines), bounce rates, average time spent on the site and the monthly totals for the last 6 months (at the very least). The monthly totals will show them a trend in growth — you’re basically showing them they’re not just paying for the current amount of traffic but future increase in traffic as well.
And don’t forget the graphs! Graphs are always nice. ;)

Rates

It’s a rate card so don’t forget about the pricing scheme. Provide several ways for advertisers to put ads on your blog. This could be int he form of varying banner sizes, link placements, advertorial text messages or paid reviews, depending on which advertising set-up you’re comfortable doing for your blog. Also include the minimum terms (mine is quarterly), modes of payment (cheques, credit card, Paypal, bank wires, etc) and maybe discounts for long term-arrangements and ad blast (advertiser buys all available ad inventory).

A screenshot of the various ad placement over your site layout would give the advertiser a good view of where their ads would show up before they start the campaign.

One of the most common questions I encounter is “how much should I charge?” That’s a very tricky question but here’s how I compute for mine:

Option 1: Stick on a CPM value. If you base your rates on cost per thousand, it’s easier to compute your monthly rate. Say, if you chose a $4 CPM, just multiply that by the total monthly pageviews, then divide it by 1,000 and you get your monthly rate. Let’s say you get 60,000 pageviews a month, so that’s 60k * $4 / 1,000 = $240. As a reference, Inq7.net charges $7 CPM.

Option 2: Outbid an existing ad source. I used this formula before when an advertiser wanted to take over one of my AdSense channel. So if you give them that top 468×60 AdSense channel, get your last months revenue for that channel and add 20-30% more. You then base on that amount as your monthly rate.

You can do the same way with other ad types – TLA, ReviewMe, etc. If an advertiser wants to put a direct ad link, give them your TLA cut + 50%. That’s still 75% of the published TLA rates. You get more and the advertisers pay less compared to getting it from the usual channels.

Hope this helps. Anybo
dy else have a different approach?

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Avatar for Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

13 Responses

  1. Avatar for hitokirihoshi hitokirihoshi says:

    this is the info that I’m looking for. thank you very much. now I’m ready to do the math and some presentations.

    I’m so afraid of undervaluing or overvaluing my blog.

  2. Avatar for Louie Sison Louie Sison says:

    by the way, the site is http://www.pampangadirectory.net and the marketer is a realty business.

    please help

  3. Avatar for Louie Sison Louie Sison says:

    This is what they call a “good problem” when business people ask your pricing and you don’t know what to say. I have a very young site. its only weeks old. then a marketer asked how much are my quotes are. my site is just picking up descent traffic, but not as the one you exampled, so i dont have an idea how much cost ads really are… nice problem huh?

    any help?

  4. Avatar for Vaibhav Maheshwari Vaibhav Maheshwari says:

    Hi sir I want rate card of the Popular Tv Channels of our country either news channel or entertainment channels .
    Plz send me reply within 24 hrs.
    Vaibhav

  5. Avatar for googler googler says:

    Is my computation right. Say I want to sell adspace at $1 CPM rates.

    17,000 (daily) X 30(days)= 510,000 pageviews
    510,000 X $1 / 1,000 = $510 per month?

  6. Avatar for googler googler says:

    Hi, can anybody give an average CPM rates for a computer site that has international traffic and 17k pageviews per day?

  7. Avatar for Valto Valto says:

    It’s a well known fact that direct advertising sales generate more ad income than adwords, tradedoubler, etc. So it’s just amazing to me how so many sites dont have any kind of ad rate card, ad pricing or even a advertising link for potential advertisers to contact.

    Also if we think about print publications, they may have rate cards but only PDF – even still today! when web is going from 2.0 to 3.0, print advertising sales are still back in 80’s

    Still – blogs and small print publications have very good and high quality reader and pin point target groups…

  8. Avatar for noelperlas noelperlas says:

    Hi abe, thanks for all the posts on advertising your on your blog. I’m still new to this and I read your blogs on this topic religiously. :) That said, I still don’t know how to charge. You lost me at CPM..

  9. Avatar for Kiven Kiven says:

    thanks, abe. =)

  10. Avatar for leo leo says:

    Thanks for all the tips!

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