What to Charge for Ads on Your Site

This post on blogher.com gives good advice on figuring out how much ads on your site should cost.

Two tips:

Find out what blogs similar to yours are charging. Find other sites, even other school news sites, with similar traffic as yours.  Here’s a comparison from compete.com for two good sites — The A-Blast and FHNtoday.  Put in your own site URL and see how you compare.  When you find a site with similar traffic, look for their rates posted on their site or email them and ask for a copy.

The blogher.com writer, Anne-Marie Nichols, is the managing editor for Mom Central Blogger University, Mom Central Food and Mom Central Goes Green. She also suggests:

Go to BlogAds.com. Click on DIY Tool, then look for rates for a standard size ad, JPG format, for, oh, one month.  For the search criteria, I tried “media” as a topic and got enough meaningful results to get a sense for what ads sell for.  If you enter “school” as a keyword in the search bar you’ll get a few relevant examples, too.  Consider traffic, of course — use compete.com to see how many visitors those sites get compared with yours.

Wendy Wallace

I run the High School Journalism Program at The Poynter Institute, a journalism school for students and professionals in St. Petersburg, Fla. I'm a member of the JEA Digital Media committee, which hosts this site.

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