Online Advertising for Startup Website

Since you are building a startup, I assume you don't have much traffic to your site. I think you should focus on generating value/content for your site first before you think about the monetizing part. To start, you should use adsense for simplicity.

Like what the rest have said, you probably need millions of impressions to start seeing substantial earnings in your bank.

Now, to know more about adnetworks out there, the answer is that there are thousands of adnetworks out there. If your site is huge enough, you don't even need to contact them, the networks will contact you first! You can see some of them from here under vendor list. Most huge publishers work on CPM.

One thing you must know though is that once you build up a huge traffic site you will have 2 different class of inventory, one is called premium (pre-ordered) inventory and the other is called remnant (excess) inventory. You should get your sales team to focus on selling premium inventory since it can range from anywhere above $8CPM (rough gauge) while remnant inventory usually fetch between $0.10 - $2 CPM depending on your inventory.

How advertisers price your inventory depends on the quality and exclusively of it. If you want to fetch higher CPM you need genuine visitors which can convert for the advertisers. This is why I asked you to focus on your content in the first place.

As for working as an affiliate, you can forget about it. I'm an affiliate marketer and I know certain sites don't convert for affiliate leads/products. Remember, your job as a publisher is to focus on generating great content and getting the best CPM rates. Affiliate is a different game. It is for marketers who have the options to buy traffic from thousands of traffic source. If you simply add an affiliate banner on your site's spot you probably will get the worst CPM you ever had.

To start learning, go AdExchanger.com

I put together an advertising program for a company website a number of years ago. In a nutshell, a few of my takeaways:

• It takes a LOT of page views to make any kind of money. 1,000 views of an ad might get you pennies. (There may or may not be a big difference in going CPM vs. CPC but I'd use CPM as a good way for a ballpark idea of what kind of money you might generate.) I don't know your financial goals but use that to asses. How many page views does your site get? Figure out how much you might be able to make based on that.

• You'll need to map out your advertising inventory. Where do the ads go? What pages, how many on a page? Banner ads, AdSense ads? If banners, what sizes and where?

• How are you going to get ads for your site? You might go AdSense or other ad network and just place what they give you. Or the affiliate approach as suggested above.

You might look at AdSense and an affiliate program to start and look at their guidelines and information. They will likely have much to help you learn more.

Best of luck!

Adsense doesn't offer the best prices, but they have a large inventory which would help delivering the right ad to the right people. The better the targeting, the better the performance.

Most startups run different ad networks on different pages to see which one yields the highest return, just be careful that there is no over lap or this doesn't violate your terms of service.

Unfortunately there's no universal answer to find out which ad network works the best for you, but trying different networks, keeping detailed analytics and trying to optimize ads with a click through rate (CTR) of less then 1% is key.

Also remember not to make the mistake most startups make out the bat, which is they make too many changes too quickly without sufficient data to make these changes. There's a reason most VCs won't jump in until after the first year of operations. Good luck!