Monetizing classical music

[dgaranin]

Hi all,

I have made already two postings and now I would like to introduce myself. I am a physicist and I maintain a few web sites, including the site of my wife, a concert pianist. This is huge site with a good traffic that I am trying to commercialize by selling CDs, music downloads, and by publishing ads.

I have already found a lot of interesting informations here about different advertizing networks that would be impossible to get from their FAQs.

Also I would apperiate advice from the members with more experience than mine. Commercializing classical music is very difficult and there are a lot of problems and open questions. I will be asking them from time to time.

Best to all,

Dmitry

[Cutter]

Do you have a URL for the site?

Apply to Adsense, and then read my article http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/adsense-optimization/

[dgaranin]

Hi Andrew,

The site URL is one of three URLs in my yahoo profile. The relevant area of this site is the free-download area

http://elenakuschnerova.com/kuschnerova-downloads.php

there is the biggest traffic.

I have been using AsSense since December 2004 with a miserable performance, below $0.5 CPM for an ad unit and 0.5% CTR. I believe targeted ads simply cannot work well for my site since the visitors want only free downloads, they do not want to buy anything, and AdSense serves them commercial ads.

If you have suggestions on the ad pacement, I will be glad to consider them. I've just read your article, thank you! At last I understood how I can use channels.

I must say that recently I managed to considerably improve AdSense' performance on my site. The key point was to prohibit deep links to my files and to serve them on specially generated small download pages that contain the ad in the center and little else. The user is looking at the ad and waiting for the download to begin automatically. A very important thing is, as it has just proved, to program a good delay time for the beginning of the download, so that the user has enough time to study the ad and click on it. Of course this all is pretty specific for my site!

Best,

Dmitry

[Cutter]

How many pageviews are you averaging a day?

[dgaranin]

3,500 pageviews daily, on average. A visitor checks 11 pages on average, they are busy downloaders.

[dgaranin]

Of course the number of pageviews, as well as that of ad impressions, has strongly increased after I introduced small download pages, for every file.

[Cutter]

I would just do different ad placements, you should be able to bump up your clickthrough rate considerably. For one thing, I'd move the ad into the actual table right under the composer's name.

[dgaranin]

This is a good idea for increasing the CTR, although the design will be worse.

Thank you,

Dmitry