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When you're just starting out with your webcomic, and don't have a large enough audience (or archive) to support a printed collection, one of the best ways to make money is through advertising on your website. The problem is that many people don't know what advertising options are available to them, so they end up making less than they could and should. I've even seen many seasoned artists sell themselves short on advertising revenue. They just slap the obligatory Google Adsense ads on their site, and in doing so forego a healthy amount of money. So I thought it would be helpful to give a summary of some available ad services. Hopefully many of these tips will be useful to non-webcomic sites as well, such as blogs. To begin, let me just give a quick overview of how putting advertisements on your site works. Ads have a few standardized sizes: the 160 by 600 pixel skyscraper, the 90 by 728 pixel leaderboard, the the 468 by 60 pixel banner and the 300 by 250 pixel rectangle. Depending on who you get your ads from, there may be a few other options available as well. You should put the ads in locations that people might click, otherwise why would anyone want their ads on your site? Some of the common places for ads are a leaderboard at the top of the page, or a skyscraper next to your comic. Check out this diagram, which shows which areas of a website are most effective for advertising (thanks to NobbyNobody of Odd-fish for sharing this link). I highly recommend that you plan your ad spaces during the design stage of your site, and not after completion. That way everything will fit together and look aesthetically pleasing. Once you have your ad spaces set, your chosen ad service will provide html code that you can paste into your site. The code displays an ad, as well as tracks how often the ad space is viewed and how many times it was clicked. This will help determine how much you are paid for the ad space. I'll go into the details on this for each ad service, but as an overview, there are basically three different models for what determines the pay: 1. CPM, where you get paid a set amount per thousand page views, 2. clicks, where you get paid per click, and 3. bidding, where your ad space is bid upon by potential advertisers. The other thing to be aware of is that your ad service may not be able to fill your ad space at all times. In such cases you can specify a backup ad to make sure the space doesn't go to waste. The usual strategy is to chain a bunch of ad services together, from best paying to worst, so that that you always make the most possible (although, don't try chaining the ads in a circle, that could get you in trouble). When choosing a service to get ads from, there are a couple of things that I would watch out for. First, although you want to make money from your site, you don't want to do it at the expense of your readership. Remember, your number one goal is to share your artistic expressions with other people! For this reason, I would avoid ads that are too intrusive. This includes pop up ads, ads that automatically play video or sound, ads with suggestive pictures (or worse), and ads that strobe and flash in an annoying manner. If your ad service doesn't provide you the option of not getting such ads, then they're not worth doing business with. Second, I would also advise against wall papering your site with too many ads. Not only is these a huge turnoff to potential readers, as I explain below, it may actually devalue your ad spaces. So I'll now review some of the main ad services individually. This is by no means an exhaustive list, just some of the ones that I found best for webcomic creators. If you have suggestions for an ad service I've left off the list, I would be interested in hearing about it. To skip to a specific review, use the following links: Project Wonderful http://www.projectwonderful.com/ Project Wonderful is the ad service you'll most likely see other webcomic creators use because it was created within the webcomic community by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics. Lately, an increasing number of blogs and other types of sites are realizing what a great service it is, so Project Wonderful is beginning to appear in more places. How Project Wonderful works is that potential advertisers can bid on your ad space for a per day amount. You'll get paid how ever much the winning bid gets (prorated if the ad only appeared a fraction of a day), and minus a 25 percent cut that Project Wonderful takes for providing their services (which is pretty reasonable compared to any other options). The bidders can find your site either through a link next to the ad space or by searching Project Wonderful's database. Bidders can also include your site as part of an ad campaign where they choose a subset of sites (with a certain traffic threshold or by matching keywords), and Project Wonderful automatically places the bids for them. Project Wonderful is a very open system. Your site's traffic (both unique visitors and total page views) is shared publicly so that bidders have a good sense for the value of that ad space. How the bidding works is that the highest bidder wins having their ad on your site, with the lowest possible winning bid (like with ebay). When the bidding is under 10 cents, it goes in 1 cent increments. So that if one person bids 2 cents and another bid 8 cents, the second person would win and have to pay 3 cents. Above 10 cents it goes in 10 cent increments instead. So, for example, if one person bids 40 cents and another bids 2 dollars, the second person wins and would have to pay 50 cents. If the two highest bids are for the same amount, the person who bids earlier wins. If your webcomic is just starting out, and not getting much traffic, advertisers will probably not bid on your site directly. Instead most of the bids will come from campaigns. Because of this you may find that the amount of money you make depends strongly on traffic. For example, at 500 page views per day you might not make much, but once you get to 1000 you could get a lot of bids because of the thresholds people set in their campaigns. Ad position also makes a huge difference for Project Wonderful. If people see that your ad is in an attractive location and they get a lot of clicks on their ads, they'll probably make larger bids on your ad space. Once you decide to use Project Wonderful, there are a number of options that you must decide for your ad space. First, you can choose to only accept bids over some minimum. Generally I would suggest avoiding putting a minimum. Seeing that there is a minimum can be a off-putting to some potential advertisers, and if less people bid on your ads it may actually make you less money in the long run because the demand is lower (you know, that whole "supply and demand" thing). The only exception is if you have a product you have to sell, you might feel that the ad space will be better utilized advertising that product if the bids are too low (and Project Wonderful does give you this option). The next issue is which ads to accept on your site. There are basically three options: 1. you can just accept everything, 2. you can only accept child friendly ads, or 3. you can accept bids by hand. Which you choose is mainly dependent on what kind of site you run. If your main customer is young children and you absolutely can't have any inappropriate ads on your site, then you'll want to choose option 3. In general, though I find the "accept everything" to be the best for the rest of us. If an inappropriate ad does pop up, Project Wonderful gives you the option to ban that advertiser from your site. The reason I choose this is that more people will bid on your ad space (and drive up the price) if they don't have to wait for the ad to be approved (people are just used to the instant gratification of the internet). In addition, if you choose to accept ads by hand, it actually takes a little while from the time the bid is made, to Project Wonderful notifying you, to you okaying the bid. Most of the bids in campaigns (and remember that will probably be most of your bids) expire within two days. Since it will sometimes take up to a day between when the ad was placed, till you okaying it, you're definitely losing a lot of money this way. You also need to decide the size and quantity of your Project Wonderful ads slots. My philosophy here is to put at least one large ad in a prominent place and at least a few smaller ads (like the 117 by 30 pixel buttons). The larger ad is for people who may want to bid directly on your site. The buttons are because they will inevitably be filled by campaigns (which are most often button advertisements). Even if you put the buttons in a rather poor place, they will get filled for this reason, netting you and easy 20 to 40 cents per day, that you can put into your own advertisement campaigns. Generally 4 to 5 buttons is enough. If you have too many buttons and the demand is not great enough, it will drive the price down (unless you're Girl Genius, then people will bid no matter how many ads you have). Out of all the ad services I'll mention, Project Wonderful is most unique in that it is so heavily used by webcomic creators. This makes Project Wonderful a useful tool for becoming aquatinted with the webcomic community. Just by having a productive ad spot, people will visit your site just to see from where they are getting the hits from. Because of these community building benefits, even though you may make more money from some of the other services I list below, I would highly suggest adding Project Wonderful if you're just starting out. One final note is that the relatively small community of Project Wonderful users can be a detriment once your site gets sufficiently popular. Because there are no companies like Nike or Coca-cola advertising through Project Wonderful, there is only so much a potential advertiser can afford. This, for example, is why Girl Genius can get away with so many button ads. If they used less, the individual bids wouldn't be that much higher because there's no advertisers available who could afford any more. For this reason, you'll see many of the highest traffic sites (like PvP) use Project Wonderful as secondary ads and other ad services for the most prominent ads spots. Google Adsense https://www.google.com/adsense/ If Project Wonderful is the most transparent of all the ad services, then Google Adsense a complete black box. And that black box is hidden in a safe, under a mountain, on an unknown planet. It's really a complete mystery what's going on with Adsense. How Adsense works is that you tell them the size of the space you want to fill and they'll serve ads to your site from their clients who use Google Adwords. On the good side, Adsense allows a lot of control in how the text ads will look (the colors and style), so that your site will still look pretty respectable despite the ads.
On the bad side, this is almost the only control you have. Unlike any of the other services I'll mention, you have almost no voice in what ads will appear on your site. Google promises that they will show ads in good taste, but if you have an extremely family friendly site, like Sheldon, this probably won't be good enough. In addition, how Google calculates the money you make is a complete mystery. The stats they give are basically the number of page views on your site, the number of clicks on ads, and how much you made. Although you clearly make more money for more clicks, how much you make for an individual click is a mystery. If you use Adsense you'll find that some days you'll make a bunch of money, and other days you'll make next to nothing. And since Google considers their ad distribution techniques to be trade secrets, you never know why. I don't even think you can tell what cut Google takes from your profits. Because Adsense almost only pay for clicks (and not just views), it is hard to make much when you are just starting out. I've gotten hundreds of thousands of page views, and I still don't have enough to cash out yet (50 dollar minimum). And don't think about clicking those ads yourself! Google warns you a number of times during the signup process to never do this, and I've heard of a few people being banned from Adsense when Google suspects them of self-clicking. So what is Adsense good for then? As I'll describe below, the most common technique is to chain a few ads together for one ad space. That way if one service can't provide an ad, it will be sent to the next one. Since Google has the highest fill rate and pays the least, it's ideal for being at the end of the chain. ADSDAQ http://exchange.contextweb.com/ Recently ADSDAQ has been becoming increasingly popular with webcomics, and for good reasons. For a modest amount of traffic (and by that I mean roughly 1000 or more page views per day), it pays better than any of the other services here. In addition, all the ads are from mainstream companies such as Washington Mutual and Kaiser Permanente, so you don't ever have to worry about something controversial appearing on your site. You don't get any choice which ads appear on your site, but they're all family friendly, so it's nothing to worry about. How ADSDAQ works is for each ad spot on your site that you want them to fill, you specify how much you'll charge for an ad to appear on your site. That's right, you get to name your price. This is specified as a dollar amount per 1000 page view (called the CPM for "cost per mil"). If ADSDAQ can fill the space for the price you specify, they will. If they can't fill the space, they'll fill the space with a replacement of your choice, such as having another ad service fill it. You can even make your own ads for things from your store and use that as the backup ad. The most common question people ask is what CPM should I use for my ad space. The lower you set the price, the higher the fill rate. But I've found (almost paradoxically) that as long as you choose a "reasonable" CPM, you make just about the same money. For example, I put the CPM at $1 and I got a 30% fill rate. I put the CPM at $3 and I got a 10% fill rate. So basically I was making the same amount of money either way. But the latter case was clearly preferable because when ADSDAQ couldn't fill it I could send the space to another advertiser more often. On the other hand, if I were to choose $10 CPM, my fill rate would be so low that I'd barely make any money. So there's some sweet spot, and the only way I know how to find it is through experimentation. But watch out, because doing the experimentation is not as easy as it might sound. Depending on who's advertising with ADSDAQ, the fill rate can vary A LOT. For example, when The Hulk was coming out, there were a lot of advertisements through ADSDAQ, and I was getting a 60-80% fill rate for pretty high CPMs. Other times nobody seems to be interested in using ADSDAQ and the fill rates are really low. So whenever you adjust the CPM, give yourself a week or so to see how the fill rate adjusts. That may seem like a long time (especially if your fill rate goes down the crapper and you feel like you're losing money), but remember you're in this thing for the long run, so a week is not really that long in that sense. Burst Media Burst Media is a little more work to get involved with in comparison to Project Wonderful, Adsense, and ADSDAQ. They require a minimum of 20,000 unique views or 100,000 page views a month. You must have a privacy policy somewhere on your site. And the ads must be in specific places on your site. You have to submit a request to join Burst Media, and it take a little bit of time to have your site reviewed. Like ADSDAQ, Burst Media caters to lots of big name advertisers, like Toyota and Verizon. Unlike ADSDAQ, they also have some more adult oriented ads (or things like smoking or alcohol related ads), but there are A LOT of different options for which ads you want on your site. Categories include video, audio, military, religious, animated, popups, pulldowns, fullscreen, and on and on. It's actually a little intimidating to go through, and I wasn't even familiar with many of the terms. Once you have chosen which categories can run on your site, you get a list of "campaigns" that you can choose for your ad space. Each campaign consists of a graphical ad, and how much you'll get paid if that ad runs on your site (some are by CPM and some are per click). If you don't like a particular ad, or you don't think it pays enough, you can block it from appearing on your site. Although I clearly make more from Burst than Adsense, I have been disappointed by the large cut Burst takes from my revenue: 45%! Now you can see what a great deal Project Wonderful is in comparison! Adbrite Out of all these ad services, I have used Adbrite the least, so I correspondingly have the least info about them. But since they seem to be increasing in popularity, I figured I should at least speak to why I stopped using them. Adbrite uses a bidding system very much like Project Wonderful. You can even have a "bid here" link by your ad spot. The big difference is that Adbrite has much larger advertising clients than Project Wonderful. While in principle, you may think this would mean more revenue, in practice this actually was a big reason why I stopped using them. Let me explain why. First of all, although they have bigger clients, they unfortunately have a much looser screening process for what they allow. This means I was given a lot of adult oriented sites and suggestive dating sites. I didn't want these ads on my site, so I was going to have to spend a lot of time manually approving ads. When I went through their list of vendors I could see how sloppy they are with who they approve as advertisers. There are pages and pages of adult sites, many of them duplicated multiple times. I've been told that Adbrite is now strictly PG, but I don't use them anymore, so I can't confirm this. Second of all, although there are more advertising clients, there are fewer webcomic advertisers. This made it extremely rare that someone would bid on my ad directly. In contrast, because Project Wonderful is so webcomic-centric, I get direct bids on my Project Wonderful spaces all the time. Finally, I've heard rumors that Adbrite is involved with many of the spam advertisements you see on the internet (like the ones that make you think your computer's hard drive will be erased). I've also heard that the coding in Adbrite ads can be used to exploit spyware, trojans, and viruses. I don't know if any of this is true, but I don't want to allow a company with such a questionable reputation access to my website. Summary of My Ad Strategy I figured it might be helpful if I give a quick summary of the ads I have on my site and estimates of how much they make me. This will give you a place to start when it comes to putting ads on your own site. Even better, hopefully some of you will see this summary and give me suggestions on how to better my ad strategy! Going from top to bottom, let's start with the leaderboard. This ad is set up to display ADSDAQ first, then if they can't fill it, Burst Media, and finally Google Adsense. On the left sidebar (I'm talking about my main site, so the sidebars don't appear here) I have 4 buttons from Project Wonderful. On the right sidebar, I have two skyscrapers, the top one is Project Wonderful and the bottom is ADSDAQ (which is Google Adsense when they can't fill). Finally, in the archive I have a rectangle at the base of the blog (which is ADSDAQ->Google Adsense again). One thing to note is that I don't ever have ADQDAQ feeding into Project Wonderful. I've seen quite a few people do this, but I really think it's dishonest. People bid on Project Wonderful ads expecting those ads to appear. If ADSDAQ suddenly gives a huge fill rate that bidder gets hosed, which just isn't fair. Given this setup, and the fact I get around 3,000 page views per day, how much do I currently make? (And I say "currently" because it has been steadily rising since I first started the comic.) From Project Wonderful I make about $10 per month, from ADSDAQ I make about $90 per month, and from Burst Media I make about $20 per month. Oops, and I almost forgot that from Google Adsense I have made a whopping $33.01 in the last eight months (yes, eight months)! Ad Services I Haven't Tried Here are a few ad services I haven't tried. If you have any experience with these (good or bad), I would be interested in hearing about it. What About No Ads? Another option that many forget to mention is no ads at all. There is definitely a potential audience out there who will feel more connected and invested in your comic if there are no ads present. Comics such as Achewood, Pictures of Sad Children, and Minus are all examples of this. The key is that your comic has to be one that will attract the kind of people who value a webcomic without ads, and I think all three of these comics do that. In contrast I think my webcomic is fairly mainstream (in format and subject matter), so most of my audience probably doesn't care too much one way or another. This model may be hard at first because there won't be any other revenue streams available to you (you won't have enough content for printed editions, nor the reader base to sell to), so you'll basically be doing it for free for a while. Another thing to watch out for is if you start a webcomic without ads and start gaining regular readers, it will probably be a big turn off to them if you decide to add advertisements later. Just something to watch out for.
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