I’m really excited! From ad earnings this month, I think that Sea Slugs! Anime Blog will actually cover costs this year! While I understand that this is not really all that impressive considering that some bloggers can actually live comfortably off their blog earnings, this is still money that I can spend on thinpacks and manga instead of hosting fees. It took years to break even, but since things have really picked up recently, I thought I’d share some introductory tips for any readers who are looking into defraying the costs associated with starting an anime blog. BTW, if you do decide to use any of these advertisers, I have recently been experimenting with the Who Sees Ads plugin, and it seems like a great piece of code.
Text Link Ads
I only recently started using Text Link Ads, and I really like this service. Basically, you tell TLA where you would like to display text ads and how many ads you would like to sell. Your site is rated, priced, and listed on their marketplace. Advertisers then can buy ad spaces on your site on a per-month basis. You can also insert ads into your RSS feed. If you select Paypal as the payment method, you get paid every month, regardless of how much you earned.
I like TLA’s model, and it’s been generating revenue at a much faster rate than Adsense. However, you don’t really know if or when a company will buy any of your space (you can also run your own private ads in the meantime). While TLA’s Wordpress plugin makes adding ads extremely easy, I think TLA should spring for a webspace redesign, as their controls are very limited, and sometimes navigation on their site can be confusing.
Adsense
Adsense is probably the first advertiser that bloggers think of when they decide to add ads to their site. Google offers both referral and per-click ads, and there are a lot of controls that the blogger can take advantage of. This was the first ad service I used, and it has been a consistent performer. While the money that comes in is not great, it is steady. There are also a wide variety of customizations and reports that you can use to design your ads and monitor how they are doing.
Overall, Adsense is easy to set-up and has decent performance, so I would recommend it to everyone. However, because “anime” is not really a big keyword for companies buying ads, don’t expect to earn a ton of money. While the revenue being paid per-click is nice, Google will only pay out once you have earned $100. This really sucks, especially when you first get started. On a side note, I tried the affiliate program and the results were pretty dismal.
Amazon Affiliate
I like what Amazon has done with the addition of the Omakase contextual ads, and their scripts return the most relevant results. Also, Amazon is a trusted vendor, and they have a lot of really great products at reasonable prices. The problem I have with Amazon Affiliate is that it is a pay-per-action model. Unless someone actually buys something after clicking one of your links, you get nothing.
I’ve had poor results with Amazon Affiliate, but I could see sites that review specific products doing well with an affiliate system. Keep in mind, the cut you get is not very big. On the other hand, Amazon only requires you earn $10 to collect payment.
Direct Advertising
This isn’t a specific service, but rather refers to securing an advertising agreement without a middleman. This is the most profitable, but also the trickiest. I’ve had only one experience so far with direct advertising, and I turned down the request. The client wanted to purchase several blocks of text on the homepage and also on a few sub-pages, and was willing to pay $500.
As great as this sounded, the ads were to run for the life of the website, and they could not be designated as ads. I didn’t like the idea of writing blocks of text that were not obviously ads, as it felt shady. I also didn’t like the idea of a never-ending ad (it would be like if Lucky Star had a child with One Piece), because then it becomes less an ad and more a ploy to increase a site’s pagerank. However, it would have been sweet to earn several hundred dollars all at once, and the experience opened my eyes to the power of direct advertising.
Which Ad Service do you prefer?
- None, ads are EVIL!!! (50%, 26 Votes)
- Text Link Ads (19%, 10 Votes)
- Adsense (17%, 9 Votes)
- Amazon Affiliate (8%, 4 Votes)
- Other (6%, 3 Votes)
- Direct Advertising (0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 52
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8 Comments
congrats on making it even!!! wow you just open my eyes even more to advertisements.. xD
Awesome tips! I’ll have to consider them for an upcoming project… A lot more down to earth than 99.99% of articles on add’s or SEO. And to think would come from my favorite anime blog LOL…
But quickie question if you don’t mind, did you just get contacted for the direct ad out of the blue? or was it more like a talk back/forth thing?
One more thing, what do you use to edit up the wordpress theme here? U a notepad type of guy or something more exotic :D????
Perhaps this is getting too much into how much traffic your site gets and/or how much money you are actually making, but I wondered around how much money you earned per, say, every 1,000 pageviews or so.
I don’t have ads on my blog, partly because I’ve never liked the idea of ads because I’ve usually see them as intrusive, but also because I just don’t think my blog gets enough traffic that it’d be worth the bother to put advertising on my site.
The TLA service sounds like it could solve the intrusive problem if it works like what it sounds like, but there is also the issue of…if I only earn pennies every month…is it really worth the trouble?
It was out of the blue, using our contact form, but I did engage in some negotiation. Unfortunately, at the end we could not come to an agreement, since I had some principles I didn’t want to abandon.
I don’t use notepad, I use notepad ++ mwahaha!
I’m not going to pretend the site earns millions. It’s in the low 3 figures, which isn’t super sexy, but it is definitely within the realistic reach of most sites. While you can earn a lot more by building something like an Anime Nano or the community at AnimeBlogger, that is not really within reach for most people. Building something like Sea Slugs! Anime Blog is something any anime fan could technically do.
Our eCPM is pretty low, but I would bet that most sites have an eCPM under $0.50. I don’t worry too much about the eCPM, though since as long as you get traffic, it’s not important that every single reader click the ads (and most people won’t). Also keep in mind that the amount paid out per click on most ads on anime pages will not be that high (as opposed to ads on a page about SEO or healthcare or insurance).
TLA is nice because if you don’t sell any ads, nothing is displayed. It’s really easy to set up, and whenever someone buys an ad it shows up on your page and you get the money. I think even at the lowest pricing, a site will earn a few dollars a month with just one ad sold. We got our first ad within a week of signing up. You get paid every month (if you use Paypal) regardless of how much you have earned, so I would say it is worth the trouble. The only tricky part is getting advertisers to buy space, but if you are new, at least your space is cheap.
Glad to hear you’re actually able to make a bit of spare cash from all the time you’ve invested into this site!
Anime is definitely not an especially big market when it comes to online advertising. Kudos for doing well as you are without completely selling your soul.
Also, thanks for the TLA review. I had never heard of them before and they seem like a great monetizing solution for certain situations. The flat rate pricing scheme for advertisers, and the ability for publishers to approve/reject specific ads are especially interesting. I have some clients who will probably be quite interested in hooking up with this service. Maybe I ought to give you a cut of the consulting fees?
Now the real question is have you seen a drop in your eCPM since switching away from that awesome Flying Osaka banner? :P
adsense, TLA and valueclick are what I use over at my site and I’ve been breaking even since the first month I tried them in July. At the current rate I will be able to endulge my otaku geekiness with the extra revenue
Very informative, as I wondered how these things worked. Too bad Wordpress.com for the most part doesn’t allow advertising. :P
That was a good read and encouragement for me. Might try that wordpress plugin on my site.
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