Before studying the text below too carefully: For the second halve of 1998 most
of the best ad stock in the ChipDir has already been sold to 'Partminer', so feel
free to email me to ask if anything is still available. They also want an option
on the first halve of 1999...
Cost per ad-view
Although a rate of $0.02..$0.04 per ad-view should be normal for a site
with such a selected audience like this I'm targetting for $0.02 or even
less for bulk ad's.
This is among other things to compensate for the lack of exact statistics
and because the ChipDir is updated and mirror in versions, so ad runs
must be quite long.
A 15% agency commission is discussable.
Duration of the runs
First you'll get a free trial on the Xs4all site only to test
your ad and reader reactions etc. After that you need to commit
yourself for a longer period. Six months minimum. Payments should
also be done per six months or a year or more.
Size
Banners should preferably be 468x60 pixels and smaller than 7..10 Kbyte.
It's discouraged to use animated GIF's and if you must, please make
sure they end after a couple of loops or seconds. Please also make
sure that your ad's use the 'netscape palette' as much as possible.
Traffic
The combined mirror sites have a traffic of about 100,000
visitors per month (199807) and about 300,000 HTML page
views per month. There are about 30 mirror sites world-wide.
Statistics and auditing
Exact statistics are not available accept from some of the (independent)
mirror sites.
Advertisers are adviced to have the ads link to a separate page of their
own so they can determine their own number of click-through's and
preferably resulting sales when relevant. On request a jump-through
page in the ChipDir itself can be created from which limited statistical
information will be available, this is however not a good method
and is preferably only used during the trial period.
Audience profile
This hasn't been fully determined yet, but probably it's 95% males of age
20 to 50. Including electronics designers, electronics repair people,
chip traders, programmers, teachers, students and hobbyists.
The ChipDir is used in all corners of the world where people are at least
a bit capable of reading English, but probably still 60% to 70% of the
visitors are within the USA and Canada. And halve of the rest in Europe.
Price per page
When you want to advertise in the ChipDir, you will need to pick location's
from this ratecard list.
This list is based on the statistics of the Xs4all site and the assumption
that the world-wide statistics are at least five times as high as those.
It's currently probably more like a factor 6 to 8.
The prices in the list are based on a rate of $0.02 per ad-view.
Assuming that the ad's will be on the tops of the pages. (For lower positions
on the pages the amounts gradually decrease to 25% or such.)
For each directory are given:
The amount for the index page.
The amounts for each individual page (that had at least a minimal
number of visitors).
The total number of visitors for all files in the given directory.
Please consider that a lot of people will see the index page AND* one or more
of the subpages, so you may want to choose only the index page or all the
subpages. To achieve a repeated impact, choose both.
For the chip manufacturer pages, please realize that a lot of people jump
directly to the manufacturer of their choice and won't see an ad at the
top of the page. It may be smarter to advertise around big manufacturers
like AMD, Intel, Motorola, NS, Philips, Siemens and TI for example,
especially when you cater to their audiences in particular.
Discounts
Whenever someone doesn't pay full price another advertiser may take
over those spots and the first advertiser will be asked to pick
similar spots elsewhere.
Questions
Please email me with any left-over questions you may still have.
This banner advertising thing is new for all of us and the insights
about it are still rapidly changing.
The ChipDir's popularity
In case you're doubting the past and current popularity of the ChipDir,
have a look on this page.
