How to deal with Lifetime Ads?

I’ve been asked by several bloggers before whether a lifetime ad placement offer is a good deal. Most of the time, publishers would bite on the offer especially when advertising inquiries are scarce.

I haven’t really thought about it much until I was offered the same recently. Took me a week to decide and here’s my basic rule of thumb when faced with a similar offer:

The very first question I’d ask — Is it worth it? Most long-time probloggers would look at lifetime ads to be a losing proposition. A one-time fee in exchange for a lifetime of ad placement is definitely a win-lose arrangement.

Someone once told me, “maybe it’s because you can afford to say no?“, and I agree. But for a lot of new publishers, this could be their only biggest significant ad offer. So, let’s just say you’re willing to take on the offer, what should you look into the deal to make the most out of it?

1. How much are they offering? How does it compare with existing ad marketplace offering monthly recurring payouts (e.g. TextLinkAds). A quick review of some of the link ad offers I heard were somewhere in the vicinity of 10 months on TLA. I would have liked that multiplier go up to 15 or 18 months.
2. What are the ads like? Usually, they are in the form of a link or a sentence or two peppered with several links. Ask how long the text and how many links per ad the advertiser wants. Factor that in with #1.
3. What’s the nature of the sites you’d be linking to? Are they spammy in nature? MFAs perhaps? If so, I strongly discourage against dealing with these.
4. Ask if you can put a nofollow tag, a Javascript or a PHP redirect instead of raw PR-passing links. If so, you’ve got a good deal here.
5. Also take into consideration the placement of the ads. They usually want it at the bottom of the content, just above the comments. See if this fits or blends nicely with your current theme and possibly future themes as well.
6. If the offer involves multiple pages, treat each one separately. A homepage ad should be given more weight (and pricing) compared to inside pages. How much ads do you currently have on those pages? If the page (esp. the homepage) already has existing advertisers, it would be harder to consider putting lifetime ads there compared to a page that has not seen any advertiser ever.

Try to haggle for more. You might squeeze in a few more dollars in return.

Again, it’s really up to you if you want to bite a lifetime ad or not. If it could pay your domain and hosting for the next couple of years, then why not? Just make sure to think about it real hard as you can never pull out those links once you’ve signed the deal and got the payment — well, up until you close down your blog, that is.