Blogging Tips

When selling your banner inventory to CPM ad networks, it can sometimes prove very difficult to sell all of your impressions. For example, if you have use Tribal Fusion, Burst Media and Casale Media then you might be lucky enough to sell 60-70% of your inventory; but what about the remaining 30%?

Step forward Shiny Ads, an advertising platform which lets you sell your remaining inventory directly to advertisers instead of selling it for peanuts to low paying CPM ad networks (these are sometimes referred to as ‘Remnant Ad Networks’).

Essentially, ShinyAds allows you to sell directly to local advertisers without the extra hassle that goes along with doing so. They are targeting the void between the high $10 CPM ad networks and the low $0.50 remnant ad networks.

Using ShinyAds, advertisers can choose which country they want to focus their campaign on. This allows you to micromanage your advertising inventory.

ShinyAds take 10% of the money you generate and pass the rest onto you once the campaign has been completed. Thankfully, ShinyAds pays out automatically via PayPal within 48 hours of the end of a campaign so you won’t have to wait til next month to cash a cheque. There is a minimum payment of $100 though.

Managing Your Ads

The first thing you need to do is set up your ad zone. You can use a custom setting or choose from over a dozen pre-set ad sizes.

Next you need to set the price of your ads. You can choose whether ads are priced per thousand impressions (CPM) or per click and you can determine how much weight each ad zone has to.

You can also decide whether advertisers can target their campaign by Country, City or Language.

Another good feature is the ability to integrate your Google Analytics ID into the advertising pages. This allows you to track how many people are visiting your advertising information area.

Once you have completed your zone you simply need to add the ‘advertise here’ code to your website and let the orders come in.

If you do have a large advertising inventory then it’s likely that you are already using another ad server to manage your ads. Thankfully, ShinyAds lets you use their ad server or use an external one such as OpenX, AdTech Helios IQ, DoubleClick Dart or Google Ad Manager.

Overview

The last site which I actively rotated and managed banners on was sold a few years ago. The script I used was mainly used for tracking click thrus but advertisers could purchase advertisements directly too. However, I never sold ads through large CPM ad networks and haven’t owned a site which made money in this manner (predominantly large content sites use this method). As such, it’s difficult for me to appreciate how useful a service like ShinyAds is to large websites with large banner inventories to fill.

From a bloggers point of view, it could be worth using. ShinyAds is very easy to use and the service is free to join up. They only take money off of ads which are purchased so no initial outlay is required compared to an ads script which may cost $99. However, Shiny Ads was clearly designed with large content websites in mind rather than small to medium sized blogs, and I doubt that many bloggers would be happy with ShinyAds keeping their money until they reach the $100 minimum payout.

Link: Shiny Ads

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