Old Dog, New Tricks

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by Bob Osgoodby

You've seen 'em... you've clicked on 'em... Banners. They're all over the place. No matter where you go on the Net, there they are.

Some say the use of banner advertising on the Net is in decline, but consider this:

In 1998, 56% of the $2 billion invested by "netpreneurs" was exclusively for the use of banner advertising. Amazingly, another 30% of this same $2 billion pie was invested in sponsorship of Web sites.... which is also done through the use of banners. That's a total of 86% and these figures are projected to quadruple by the year 2002.

Banner advertising is, by far, one of the most popular forms of Internet advertising around... and in my judgment, it's going to stay that way for a long, long time.

So, how do YOU use this tool to advertise your site? You could dive in head first by approaching a large site offering outside banner advertising and negotiate an ad placement campaign. Some of the ISP's, such as Prodigy and AOL do this for a hefty fee of thousands of dollars per month! Or you could "get your feet wet" by using banner advertising to promote your site by joining a "banner exchange".

There are several dozen banner exchanges on the net, and they all work pretty much the same way. When you join (usually for free), you have to have typically "two" visitors to your web site in order to earn a showing of your ad on another exchange members web site. This, of course is the (in)famous "two for one exchange." Some do a little better than that... 1 1/2 to 1, 1.3 to 1, etc. But in every case, the exchange organization keeps some of the trade value so they can sell it and earn their bread and butter.

This formula has worked well for many of these organizations. In fact, some have grown to incredible heights such as LinkExchange. In their first 20 months of business, LinkExchange enrolled in excess of 250,000 members. This phenomenal growth allowed the LinkExchange owners to sell out to Microsoft earlier this year for over $300 million. Yep, you heard that right... three hundred million bucks.

There's another kind of banner organization having enormous success on the Net. They're called "advertising networks," or "click networks," and they all work pretty much the same. When you join them as a member (which can be tough to do sometimes as most of these organizations require significant visitors or impressions at your site to even qualify for membership) you are offered x cents per click-through each time one of your visitors sees and "clicks" on a network-supplied banner.

All of these organizations simply sell banner advertising to outside advertisers, and then share the revenue with the web sites who host the ads. It's pretty cool and it works, and these organizations are doing incredibly well for themselves.

But there is another formula which I recently learned of. This one combines BOTH types of exchanges. It's called the BannerCo-op, and instead of a 2 for 1 trade, it offers you a "one to one trade PLUS cash".

The method is so simple and powerful, I'm surprised no one has thought of this before. Here's how it works: You join for free, isn't that a wonderful word <grin>. Then, every time someone visits your page, they'll see a banner with two ads inside it. You can see an example of this at: the BannerCo-op Site. Look at the bottom of the page and you will see two side by side banners.

When this happens, an "impression" is logged for you and your ad is then shown elsewhere on the Banner Co-op.com network of thousands of sites. This is simply, hands-down, the best exchange that I have come across.

Plus, without doing or paying anything extra, you can actually earn cash by joining the Banner Co-op network. Of the two ads that appear in the banner on your site, one is always an ad purchased by an outside advertiser. Each time one of your visitors clicks on this "paid" banner, you get paid 10 cents. I haven't seen anything like this before.

The Co-op also offers "Partnership" positions to qualified applicants. You can actually own your own* banner exchange (without having to worry about the operations side) through their program. While there is a fee to belong to this part of their program, there are several levels of participation that should be of interest.

There is a bottom line here. If you are going to have Banner Ads on your Web Site advertising the products or web sites of others, you want the best deal you can find. In the ever changing world of the Internet, you CAN teach an "Old Dog New Tricks".