My goal with this website from the beginning has been to write articles about exploring ways of making money outside of working for someone else and to need less money by being more self-sufficient, and also as of late covering topics about how the current political and economic evironment may affect all of our freedoms to pursue happiness in this manner.
If along the way the website itself managed to generate some money, well then great. That being said, my Google AdSense revenue has stunk recently. So I decided to try a new approach via TextAdMarket.com. It’s a site that lets you sell text ads for a whatever price you determine based on what you think you can sell and based on your traffic level. Ads are sold on a per day basis. If an ad space sells, then the price goes up. For each day that none of the ad spots sell, the price drops. It’s based on supply and demand. A website supplies the ad space but if there’s no demand then the price drops. A publisher can also use a fixed price if he doesn’t want to use the Market price setup.
I think it’s a great concept and I’m giving it a try to see how it goes. Another option that TextAdMarket.com gives you is to allow pay-per-click ads to show up in the ad spots until a spot is actually sold. The only hiccup I’m seeing so far is that it seems like, if the pay-per-click ads are showing then there is no real way for your website visitors to see that the ad slots are available for sale. You can create a separate link to the ad and manually add that to the site but that seems less convenient than it needs to be.
For publishers, signing up your own site is free and only takes a few minutes. For advertisers, you are buying ad space of course but in a very targeted way as opposed to a kind of blind approach applied using Google Adwords.