How can I make the most money with a TV station website?

[KELOMAN]

I recently received a promotion at KELO-TV in Sioux Falls, SD. I was a Sales Assistant for over a year, and now I am an Internet Account Executive for www.keloland.com . This is a newly created position, as online advertising sales were never really a focus for the station in previous years. Our site receives approximately 2.4 million visits and 30 million page views a month. Our current Alexa rank is 43,935. All of our current online advertising is sold to local advertisers. We have 728 x90, 160 x90, and 160 x 338+ banners for sale, as well as streaming video sponsorships.

I am thinking of introducing Google Adsense as an option for additional income, and including it on all of our individual news stories pages. These pages total over a million page views a month. Can someone tell me if this is a good idea. I know enough about AdSense to know that it is "contextual", so the individual stories should serve up plenty of great keywords. Our webmaster is a little worried it will crowd things, and wants to sell the space in individual news stories to local advertisers.

Can somebody give me some direction? Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[Emancipator]

google ads if implemented correctly will work well for you to fill empty inventory but it wont get you the high cpms you are getting from your other advertising. Assuming the sales staff are selling it correctly. I would say you can get 0.90 - 1.20 cpm off google with little effort but you should be getting twice that from your other advertising. So as filler it would work but not sure what else you would use it for.

[KELOMAN]

So, what is the industry CPM average for direct to advertiser ads? We based our redesigned rate card on $5 CPM. It was just a figure we pulled out of the air as a starting point. We adjusted it for our homepage offerings (the price was rediculously high), but most of our subdirectory pages have all of their ads priced around $5 per thousand impressions. Any thoughts on this?

[Cutter]

How much of those 30 million monthly impressions can you sell at $5 CPM? I wouldn't be too concerned about the industry averages, but rather what number is going to maximize your site's income.

What you want to do is sell CPM ads for the areas that would perform poorly for PPC ads. This would include the header & sides. PPC ads (we'll say Adsense right now) should be placed in the central area. Take a look at this illustration from Google, the yellow areas would be great for sold CPM inventory: https://www.google.com/support/adsen...y?answer=17954

You should contact both Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network https://publisher.yahoo.com/portal/login.php and see what they can do for you. I would sign up for both and rotate their ads, then in a few weeks look at what paid the most and adjust your inventory accordingly.

You can also look at what other media sites are doing with Adsense. For example, The New York Times sticks adsense way at the bottom of their articles. Not the best place to make money, but it does a good job without getting in the way. Most television station websites also like to bury PPC ads at the bottom of the page. Once again, doesn't get in the way, but you could do a lot better. The one advantage you have is shorter articles, which means a higher percentage of readers are going to see them and possibly also click through.

[AmbulanceBlues]

I read the Houston Chronicle frequently and I always thought their ad placement was well balanced without getting in the way of the article.

www.chron.com

(In case I have broken some taboo, my intention is not to spam for the Chronicle.)

[KELOMAN]

Yeah, I do like the "Chronlinks". Is this type of thing usually hosted by a third party? I would like to see something similar on www.keloland.com , but our webmaster has his hands full as it is. We do occassionally work with a local company called NetPartners to do a few things with our site, like the "Automall" and an upcoming Employment Page.

Can anyone drop some names of companies that provide cost-per-click services similar to this?