I decided yesterday to remove my site from the new Post Level Ads service from Text Link Ads. Although Text Link Ads have been very successful at selling Text Link Ads on my site, I decided that the rates for the new Post Level Ads were too low to make them worthwhile adding.
The rates for Post Level Ads are based solely on Page Rank, rather than a combination of Alexa Rank and Page Rank. John Chow worked out that the following prices are charged for Post Level Ads:
- PageRank 2 – $5.00
- PageRank 3 – $6.00
- PageRank 4 – $8.00
- PageRank 5 – $10.00
- PageRank 6 – $25.00
- PageRank 7 – $50.00
The revenue share for Post Level Ads is 50%, so even if you have a PR7 page that’s doing even only 100 page views a day then that works out to a CPM of around $8. However, it’s likely that a PR7 page would have much more traffic. Even if only 1000 page views were being generated per day, then the CPM would fall to less than one dollar.
This was why I removed my sites from the Post Level Ads scheme, as the pages that advertisers were trying to buy were generating 200-1000 page views per day, but I was only going to get around $0.30-0.60 CPM. I decided there was no way I was going to add any additional advertising to my site that had such a low return. It’s exactly the same reason why I’ve also removed my site from the Vizu Polls ad scheme, as the income they were generating wasn’t worth the amount of ‘noise’ they were adding to my site. I also wasn’t happy with the lack of control over when and how Vizu polls appeared, and my frustrations increased when they even removed the customisation options.
After doing my CPM analysis, I now find Post Level Ads to be a bit of a strange scheme and I can’t see what type of sites it is targeted at, as the rates for sites with both sites with both low and high Page Ranks are too low. It’s hard to even see how the scheme might be attractive to sites with lots of pages, as they would be better off adding a run of site banner than adding Post Level Ads. Having a lot of pages listed on Post Level Ads would also be very hard to manage, as the publisher interface needs a lot of work.
Have you had managed to sell any Post Level Ads on your site. How do the CPMs for your Post Level Ads compare to the other ads you run on your site?
