Advertising rates for an online gambling blog

Placing banners and selling text ad links to monetize your gambling blog comes down to attractive advertising rates. Very often I get asked by other bloggers how much to charge for an advertisement and it was something I was trying to figure out a couple years ago. Even after a thorough search there is not a real and useful answer written anywhere. Advertising rates do seem to fluctuate and depend on the blog's niche and supply and demand. So, how did I do last year?

In 2009 I made more than 20 advertising deals for Jimmakos.com. I usually sold text ad links at the front page for an average price of $50/month but I also placed banners for a monthly fee and published promotional articles. As the articles are charged in an one-time fee manner, I won't take them into consideration. The average cost for a banner has been about $140 per month depending on the placement in the front page. But how did I come up with those figures?

In the beginning I really had trouble finding out the "fair" price for my blog's advertising opportunities. As every other blogger out there, I must have charged a little in the first advertising deals. As the interest of the advertisers grew, I bumped up the prices until no advertiser would accept my rates. It was time to step back and ask for less. By the time I did that I had already written an email I was sending to every advertiser I was contacted by. The email included my advertising rates for all of my advertising products, being either banners, text links or promotional articles. I also included information about my other gambling blogs and sites, in case they were interested in them as well. And most of them did actually!

So, what is the actual advertising rates for a gambling blog? How much should you ask for next time you get an email from an advertiser or a big firm? How do you adapt my advertising rates to your own blog's traffic?

You must have already read about something called "CPM". It means cost per mille, cost per one thousand pageviews. It is the most commonly used measurement in advertising. But you will have hard time finding out the average CPM expected in gambling. One of the reasons for that might be that Google doesn't accept gambling blogs, so no data is known to public. However, since I do have my blog's traffic stats from Google Analytics and my actual advertising revenue for 2009, why don't I run down the numbers for you.

I will focus on my front page advertising deals, since they were the majority of them. My gambling blog's front page had a Page Rank of 3 in the beginning of 2009 and reached 4 by summer, which should have some impact to my advertising performance. Anyhow, the front page received 29,000 pageviews in 2009. For calculations' sake, we will assume 2,000 pageviews monthly. So, if I managed to sell a text ad link for $50 averagely, that mean my CPM for my gambling blog was $25. That is one of the highest I ever encountered searching in internet. I must have done something right, I suppose. Usually CPM range between $1 and $30, depending on the blog's niche and popularity. For example if you own a how-to-make-money-online blog the average CPM is $2. If you own a financial (loans, banks, etc.) website CPM can increase even above $20. Gambling is one of the most lucrative niche in advertising and high CPM's are expected.

Regarding banners, I already mentioned that the average monthly cost was $140, which means $70 CPM for gambling banners! You should charge more for banners than text links, but I 'd never predicted such big difference. Admittedly the advertising deals involving banner placement weren't that many as the text ad links, and they usually expired without renewals, but I'm still pretty satisfied by the outcome.

How much will I charge in 2010 for advertising in my gambling blog? I admit I won't charge that much now that I have the experience and the historical data available. Since my page rank dropped, I had many advertising deals expired and I rarely receive inquiries in my inbox regarding advertising nowadays. I'm thinking something like $50 CPM for top banner and $20 CPM for text links. I will also try selling banners site-wide since the average monthly pageviews my blog receives exceed the 16,000 mark. Maybe a $10 CPM site-wide banner sell easier. Who knows, other bloggers in gambling certainly did better than me!

Blogging - Blog Monetize