For those websites that are not selling goods directly, there are still ways to
earn money from your website. You, as a publisher, can include advertisements on
your pages for your users (you can also use affiliate
links). Advertisements come in many formats, some obtrusive and some very
benign.
Popular advertising formats include:
Banners
Standard banners have been around for quite a while. They
display graphics, usually in .gif or .jpg format although flash banners
are becoming more common. Standard sizes include 728x90, 468x60, 125x125
and 88x31, but there dozens of other common size banners available.
Pops
Pops became prominent in the late 90's. Pops are advertisements that
are opened in new browser windows (or tabs in the case of tabbed
browsers). There are 3 primary pop types, exit pops, popups, and
popunders. Pops are usually initiated with Javascript code downloaded
withing the HTML of a viewed page.
Interstitials
Interstitials are advertisements that load on an intermediate page
when a user clicks a link. For example, you may load an interstitial
ad page when a user clicks a link to get to more content. The page
typically will tell the user that your site is supported by
advertising, show the ad, and typically include a link to immediately
go to the ultimate content page. The term "interstitial" is not
universally used, so you may find advertising networks using similar
terms to describe this type of ad.
Layer Ads
Layer ads have become more prominent in the last year or so. Using
Javascript, a smaller window is opened and scrolled to or is placed at
a spot near the middle of the page. These ads can be closed by
clicking the 'X' in the top right of the layered ad window.
Text Ads
Text links have been around for quite a while. Text ads however have
really taken off in the past few years with the increases in PPC
advertising. In particular, Google's Adsense has become a solid money
maker for websites of all sizes by providing text ads targeted to the
content of each page.
Before deciding to run advertisements on your website, you should take some time
to think about what kind of ads will work best on your site. IF you are running
a forum based website you also need to understand that most ad networks will not
accept your site for banner ads as users on forum sites very regularly ignore
banner ads. Advertisers will not pay for ads that have no chance of providing
them a return.
