5 Ways Having Your Own Advertisers is Better Than Using Ad Networks

As a publisher, you want to be in complete control of the advertising that appears on your website. You can choose to sell directly to advertisers or work with ad networks to get the ads that you need. The good thing about this scenario is that you don’t have to commit to one or the other, with many publishers relying on a combination of direct ads and those that come through an ad server. There are definitely pros and cons to be had with both, which is why a mixture is often the way that many publishers choose to go. Let’s take a look at what you can expect from both types of advertising.

The most obvious benefit of selling directly to the advertiser is that you get to keep 100% of the revenues that you pull in, as well as being able to charge a higher ad rate. You also get the opportunity to build a relationship with each advertiser, which may eventually lead to future ads coming your way. Business owners regularly network and will let each other know about great advertising opportunities.

On the negative side of things, you are going to have to spend money on a sales force who you hope will be able to deliver a high volume of quality advertisers. Being able to land those advertisers means that your site will need to have a very large following in order to make it appealing to advertisers. If you are going it alone, generating traffic and finding advertisers is a juggling act that doesn’t always go well. Even if you can pull it all off, you will need to be adept at managing the ads that you bring in.

It is those negatives that often drive publishers to look at ad networks when they sell ad space. While that may seem like a great idea at the start, ad servers end up taking a good chunk of the revenue that you generate from advertisers, with the number sometimes going as high as 50%. You will have no way to build a relationship with any of the advertisers you use, and the ad rate that you charge will be a whole lot less that what you would get if you sold advertising directly.

You have to look at the positives that come from going the ad network route, though, and those begin with having the ability to do it all yourself. If the ads are supplied by a network, you will not have to dip into your budget to hire a professional sales team. You will also have immediate access to a wide variety of advertisers, many of whom you may not have thought of or been able to get if you had approached them directly. The one thing that the ad network option has in common with direct advertising is that you will need a solid ad management solution in place to take care of your ad inventory.

Perhaps the best way to approach this issue is to sell all the ad space that you can directly, while leaving the ad networks for those spots that are still sitting unsold.