Advertising to Make Money

Advertising is huge on the internet. Some people hate it, others (like you after you read this) love it. If you remember my posts about traffic, this is one of the easiest ways to make money with lots of traffic. Some of you out there avoid ads like the plague, but I assure you that a lot of people do click and are making publishers a lot of bank. Here are the major ways you would be compensated through online advertising:

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) / Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

Cost-Per-Impression/Thousand (CPI/M) / Pay-Per-Impression (PPI)

Pay-Per-Action (PPA) / Cost-Per-Action (CPA)

Individual Advertisers

CPC is the most common form of advertising these days. Ever notice those links on websites with "Ads by Google" somewhere pasted around them? Those are Adsense ads and they are CPC. Every click generates the site owner some money. Each click could generate a few cents, to tens, to hundreds(?) of dollars. There are restrictions, such as you can't have a page with just ads, you can't click on your own ads, and you can't coax, cajole, or otherwise entice your visitors to click on the ads... otherwise you can say bye bye to your account. From what I hear it's almost impossible to get unbanned from Google Adsense. But Google isn't the only CPC advertiser out there. Yahoo! got into the CPC game with Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture), and Microsoft very recently (2006) has been using Microsoft adCenter, which works the same way as the other two. There are also other similar ad services, like AdBrite. And don't forget banner ads that are PPC. In most cases, these are contextual ads, meaning they change dynamically to match the page's content.


CPM, or Cost-per-Thousand (M is the Roman numeral for 1000), is also fairly common. You get paid per impression or more commonly, per 1000 impressions. An impression is a "view," so for every 1000 people who view the ad, usually a banner, you get paid a certain amount. Obviously, this is a great idea for high-traffic websites, although in my experience, it was never as profitable as CPC or affiliate marketing.


PPA is great if you're the advertiser. Publishers are paid per action, which usually means signing up for something or using a search engine. Clicks don't cut it with PPA. It's harder to make money because surfers are generally a lazy bunch, but you're usually paid higher per action (high-paying keywords in PPC are the exception).


You can also get money directly from individuals for ad placements. This is actually a lot more common than most people think. Say you have a site with over 4 million unique visitors a month. A banner in a hotspot on your front page would be an attractive piece of virtual real estate for an advertiser. In most cases you would agree to a fixed price and keep the banner in place for a certain length of time (weeks to months). I wonder how much money MySpace is getting to host those ads at the top of every user page...