Selling Ads on High-Traffic Internet sites For Dummies

I've done this: at least indirectly. I WROTE CricInfo.com's banner ad server, for a site that did a quarter of a billion pageviews a month in 2000, and probably does more now. I do actually know what I'm talking about.

Managing ad inventory for a site THAT large was hell. Managing one for LJ, or Yahoo!, or a site of similar size (orders of magnitude more pageviews, potentially), is a complete mugs game if you want to micromanage every last ad. It costs you a fortune in manpower to close every deal and track every ad, and it costs you a fortune to reinvent some form of targetting so that ads get to people who might possibly be interested in them (because the good ones are, unsurprisingly, patented). Unless you have some miraculous business model that means that the infrastructure for your high traffic site pays for itself, you have to sell ads or enough subscriptions to cover costs. And if you want anyone to actually pay you decent money for your advertising space, you have to provide some means of giving them /qualified/ ad targetting, where there's at least SOME matchup between ad and viewer, otherwise your ad impressions are worthless.

So you don't, if you have any sense, sell your own adspace, or spend ages fixing your targetting code (CricInfo's was still not perfect after me tweaking it for half a decade, and all it had to worry about was making sure that everyone who paid for x amount of ads on various subsets of the site got what they paid for, no keyword targetting as such at all: Yahoo are on their third search-ad targetting system and it still sucks). You delegate that to the likes of Google AdWords, or Doubleclick, or Yahoo! display advertising, or any of a number of other companies that you /have/ to trust to use what qualifying data you can feed them to target your viewers. In short, you say "here's some ad space, here's some targetting data, you have ad inventory, please match the two and we'll take a cut."

And sometimes, they fuck up. Big time. Alcohol adverts to Pakistan was CricInfo's big one. Keyword-based targetting is not an exact science, even now, and it still requires human beings to describe the target areas when the ad's set up, and for them to understand all the implications of some quite scarily dense code that borders on natural language/AI at times.