Can someone explain this to me?

[deronsizemore]

I'm kinda lost here on the "How to make money with your Website" post by Chris here on the site.


You do not need to pick one ad network, try to join them all and then use the ones who do best for you. You can use more than one ad network at a time. No ad network can fill all of your inventory (not even Google) so if you send 1000 impressions to an ad network they might only serve 500 ads. The other 500 ads are called defaults, and you get to specify to the ad network what they serve for those ads. So typically what publishers do is form a chain of ad networks and send defaults from one to another. So for instance your primary network (best paying) may be Tribal Fusion, but Tribal Fusion can only fill 50% of your inventory, so you tell Tribal Fusion to send it's defaults to Fastclick. Fastclick then fills 50% of your remaining inventory, so you tell Fastclick to send it's defaults to Casale. Casale then fills 50% of your remaining inventory from Fastclick. So instead of only serving paying ads 50% of the time had you just used one network, you serve them 82.5% of the time. Just in case I'm not clear, or that you take me too literally, 50% fill is just a percentage I chose for this example. In reality ad network fill rates can fluctuate between 80 and 20%.

What is your "inventory" in this quote? What does sending impressions and serving ads mean?

I've litterally read it 4 times and its just registering with me.

[paul]

Inventory is pages on your site where you wish to place ads. When you sign up for adsense you will see a place to indicate an alternate ad network. That is where you would place a secondary ad network.

So when someone visits your page, if Google doesn't have an add to put there it looks to the alternate. If they don't have one it goes to the next. And on down the chain.

To be honest, I never bother. However, I am sure the extra income can be significant.

[deronsizemore]

Okay...what does this mean?


send 1000 impressions to an ad network they might only serve 500 ads

[paul]

With adsense, and I assume, the other ad networks you add a little bit of javascript code to each of your pages. When a visitor clicks on the link to one of your pages the javascript calls home and says send an ad to this page. However, maybe the ad network hasn't sold enough ads that day, so if they get 1000 requests for an ad they have only been paid to serve 500 times they can't complete the request. In this case, if you have an alternate ad network in place, maybe they can fill the request.

You as the publisher of the page only get paid when an actual paid ad is served.

[deronsizemore]

With adsense, and I assume, the other ad networks you add a little bit of javascript code to each of your pages. When a visitor clicks on the link to one of your pages the javascript calls home and says send an ad to this page. However, maybe the ad network hasn't sold enough ads that day, so if they get 1000 requests for an ad they have only been paid to serve 500 times they can't complete the request. In this case, if you have an alternate ad network in place, maybe they can fill the request.

You as the publisher of the page only get paid when an actual paid ad is served.


Sorry to be so ignorant on this, but I've got yet another question. You said maybe the ad network hasn't sold enough ads that day, why would it have to be "that day". Couldn't google go back to the day before or even the month before for that matter and serve up an ad for your page or is that just not the way it works? The ads that google displays on your site through adsense are what people pay for though Adwords correct?

[John]

What he is trying to say is the ad network charges a company for a certain amount of ads and when there are no more ads left they don't show anything.

Let's say I purchased 10,000 banner impressions per month from an ad network, and let's make it easy, lets say I was the ad networks only client. So this ad network can only give publishers 10,000 banner impressions per month but between all it's publishers the network has 15,000 impressions per month. So the network serves the 10,000 impressions and after that they don't serve anything because I have only paid for 10,000.

So the next 5000 impressions the ad network recieves would go to the publishers default (2nd tier) ad network.

I hope I simplified things for you, I hope I didn't confuse you even more :):)

[deronsizemore]

What he is trying to say is the ad network charges a company for a certain amount of ads and when there are no more ads left they don't show anything.

Let's say I purchased 10,000 banner impressions per month from an ad network, and let's make it easy, lets say I was the ad networks only client. So this ad network can only give publishers 10,000 banner impressions per month but between all it's publishers the network has 15,000 impressions per month. So the network serves the 10,000 impressions and after that they don't serve anything because I have only paid for 10,000.

So the next 5000 impressions the ad network recieves would go to the publishers default (2nd tier) ad network.

I hope I simplified things for you, I hope I didn't confuse you even more :):)


Okay I think I'm getting it...finally you're saying! People will buy so many banner impressions per month from say Adwords and then, the banner impressions which were purchased will show up on publishers' sites though adsense and then when the purchases impressions run out then it will go to your default second ad network.

And an "impression" refers to in this case when someone views your ad right? So in your example, 10,000 people would view your advertisement and then the rest would go to the default second ad network.