Advertising Opportunities
Over the past few weeks I’ve been receiving requests from various site users and also designers asking about advertising opportunities on Get Free Web Designs, so I wanted to test the waters by placing a 125×125 pixel banner on the site and see what sort of feedback I get from our blog readers and our open source web designers.
Currently the only 125×125 pixel banner on the site is an affiliate link which is in the right side bar of the site.
For those interested in some site stats, GFWD’s is currently a Google Page Rank 5 (PR5) with an Alexa ranking of 81,766 (and it’s improving daily).
Site traffic: For the month of March 2009 we received 9,360 visitors to the site which averages out to 312 per day which isn’t bad for the site only being public for a couple months.
As of this post, we have had 6,266 visitors and we still have approximately 2 weeks left in the month and of course the site traffic and exposure is building every day.
Here are my current thoughts for ad space on GFWD’s… I’m thinking of limiting the available slots to only 8 with a price of $30.00 USD per month and if people pay 3 months in advance, they would get a price break of $20.00 USD per month, so it’s like buying 2 months and getting 1 for free.
This is still a work in progress, but please share any thoughts you might have or if you have some interest in placing a 125×125 pixel banner on the site, get into contact for more information.
After you’re done reading this blog post, be sure to check out our awesome collection of Free XHTML and CSS based web designs. We currently have over 350 designs to choose from and more are submitted every day.
I think that’s a realy good idea, Sean. I certainly think it would be better for the site to do it this way rather then implementing Adsense. The ad revenue will offset some of the hosting costs as well as possibly raise some revenue for contests, if you decide to run them at some future date.
Thank you for your feedback Karen.
Since I just added the affiliate banner, there isn’t any revenue being generated yet and Google Adsense isn’t generating a whole lot yet, but as time goes on, it should pick up.
I agree with Karen. Plus, it is your site to do as you want. You are communicating well with the community what your intentions are!
Thank you for your support Len. Even though the site is privately owned and managed, we still want feedback from the open source design community since without the designers and their support, GFWD’s wouldn’t be a great site.
Well I for one don’t mind the adds at all, Now this is just me but 30 bucks a month seems a little low to me for this site. Just my two cents.
Things are moving right along Good job Sean.
I think $30.00 USD per month is a fair price, not too high or too low. I’m sure down the road if all goes well we could raise the price, but for now it’s a low price while the site is still growing.
Thank you for your continued support of GFWD’s.
I agree with Sean on this. We want to make enough to cover all the costs (maybe even some additional development or advertising!), but I’d rather make the ads less expensive and easy to sell.
I think the ads are a great idea too. The site seems to be coming along really well — over 400 designs now? — and if you can find a good way to generate some extra revenue to offset hosting costs, run contests, whatever, I think all of us who come by here would be most happy.
Hi Jan. Thank you for your continued support of GFWD’s. Indeed the site is coming along nicely.
As for us having 400+ designs, as of this comment we actually have 366 approved designs.
So why the difference between design ID numbers and actual approved designs?
It happens when we’ve removed a design either because it didn’t follow the design submission guidelines or because we uploaded then removed some test designs when we are working on new site features, etc.
Ah, I see. I think I was misled by the design numbers! Anyway, the 400 mark isn’t that far.