A future with ads on amcoustics.com

Instead of complex billing per click or impression, I use a simple flat-fee model per month. This allows you to plan your budget precisely without surprises.

Pricing based on Geography

The cost depends on the geographic regions you want to target. For example:

• Worldwide: 400eur / month
• DACH region (GER, AUT, SUI): ~30eur / month

If you have specific countries in mind, just let me know and I will calculate a fair price for you.

Long-term discounts

I value long-term partnerships. The more months you book in advance, the lower the monthly rate becomes. Contact me for a custom quote based on your preferred duration and region.

What is important to note is, that amcoustics.com is for sure much better to place your audio and acoustics related banners at than generic social media platforms.

To back it up with numbers: the average click through rate for banners placed on amcoustics.com has been ~1.5%. The average for google display ads is 0.46%, Facebook: 0.3% and instagram 0.1%. Sure, this will always depend on your banner but it shows a trend.

Why I moved away from CPM/CPC

• Firstly, a monthly flat fee is much easier for both sides to manage. You know exactly what you pay, and I know exactly when the campaign runs.
• Secondly, it focuses on the partnership and the value of being present on a niche-expert site rather than just "buying eyeballs".

It all starts with an email. Contact me, and tell me who you are, what you do as a company, and what you want to promote on my page. Please read my answer to the question "What banners are allowed on amcoustics.com?" before you do that.

When we agree on the offering the banner setup works like this

You send me the following:

• a 300x250px banner
• the target link to the page you want the user to visit
• necessary information about your company to get the invoice

In addition, you can decide on the following parameters for each banner:

• the start month and duration of your campaign
• a list of countries/regions you want the banner to be displayed in.

After the payment is processed, I will enable the campaign.

I am also using "promo" instead of a widespread word to remind myself that it is something different than the average ad. There are too many spammy ads out there. Ads can have value for users; promos shall have value for my users.

I think the closest word to "promo" is "campaign". But you can have a campaign on many channels. My promo would be just a part of it. Or you call something a campaign in your company and start two promos on amcoustics.com, both being part of that campaign.

I don't have a strong opinion on the differences between the words yet. I am happy to learn what it needs on the go in close cooperation with my customers.

And maybe it helps not to call things "ad" when it comes to ad-blockers (I hope there are no promo-blockers).

The most important policy is "show news instead of spam".

So I will only allow banners that are (in my opinion) interesting for as many visitors as possible.

About my visitors:

All of my users are interested in room acoustics. Most of them are searching for help with small room acoustics.

I want to focus on two topics: room mode mitigation and sustainable room acoustics.

room mode mitigation

When it comes to room modes, amcoustics.com has been the top google result for years. Pretty much everyone interested in room modes visits amcoustics.com, especially my room mode calculator amroc. If you want to promote anything that helps people who try to mitigate room modes, I am pretty sure amcoustics.com is the best place to show your ad.

sustainable room acoustics

I am very interested in sustainability and want to use my website to spread the word about sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based classics.

Anything else

My focus is on the above topics. If you try to reach these target groups, you and my users will profit the most.

But those topics are by no means complete. Please write me if you think your products or services interest my users.

I picture it as a pyramid. The top is small. In relation to the total world population, only a few people are interested in room modes. But you will reach nearly everyone worldwide interested in room modes on amcoustics.com. The bottom of the pyramid is bigger, meaning that a more extensive part of the world's population is interested in the product. But there are also increasingly more sites on which you could place your ad. And the chance to bore precisely MY users increases.

I prefer ads on the top of the pyramid. Let's discuss your ideas and how the value can be the greatest for you and my visitors.

In the beginning, I want to keep it very simple. One banner size, always at the same position on desktop screens and on (almost) every site.

"Almost" because, for two of my tools (amray & amalyzer), losing the space would hurt the user experience. So there will be no banners for those two for now.

At least, that's the goal.

Displaying banners on desktop screens works as described above.

Regarding mobile screens, it is not that easy as there is no space for placing banners in the same position on each page. I also want to minimize the need for pop-ups to a minimum. It's better to put the banners inside the content. That improves the user experience and the likelihood that users will enjoy your banner.

I still have to decide on the position of banners for each page and where to use a pop-up.

Of course, banners are only displayed where they fit the layout and region requirements.

Please also read my answer to the question about upcoming features.

As this is crucial, and I want to be very transparent with my decisions both to my ad customers and my page users, let me be very detailed here.

For now, there is only one banner position and, therefore, just one banner at a time.

I will cycle through the available banners as the average users' time on my pages is ~8min!! So, just one page view, but multiple banners after each other!

Not switching banners would mean that one banner is visible for a long time (my visitors stay on one page for ~8 min on average). Your banner would be visible for a longer, continuous period of time, but it would also be displayed less often. Showing it to a visitor that has already seen it for a long time probably gains no benefit. Cycling brings variety and maybe even attention. All in all I think the pros outweigh the cons.

The following happens:

For each page request, the server decides on all banners that COULD BE displayed for this user. That means:

• the booked month is active
• you want the banner to be displayed in the country the page view is coming from

All chosen banners are ordered randomly and are displayed to the user one after the other. I played around with the time, researched other websites, and set the time between two banners to 20sec for now. That is common, and it feels right for now. I will reevaluate this when some real and different banners are online. I am also very open for your feedback!

When all banners have been shown, I start again with the first banner.

Payment is handled in advance. Once we have agreed on the regions and the duration (months), you will receive an invoice. After the payment is received, your campaign is scheduled and will go live at the agreed start date.

I usually work with a minimum of one month. Since I am targeting specific regions, even small regional providers can get very affordable rates for a whole month of presence on amcoustics.com.

The vision is to let the banners be news from the acoustic world. This includes making advertising space available to small/regional providers/service providers.

From today's perspective, I don't want to proclaim any limits regarding quantity. Quality is important to me (which I also want to ensure in the approval process step described above).

If you have three individual exciting and/or sustainable products, then three banners will be fine. If you create three banners for the same product so that they appear more often, I will remind you of my vision "show news instead of spam".

Changing the banner during the promo's runtime is feasible. The banner picture must still be approved beforehand.

Unfortunately, I can't answer that today because I need to learn more about how adblockers work. What can always happen is that ad blockers don't block today but learn to block tomorrow. It's an ongoing war between ad providers and ad blockers.

What is essential to know: as I host and serve the banners myself to ensure privacy and quality, there is a good chance they are less likely to be blocked by generic "third-party" filters.

We should also remember that ad blockers have been invented because website owners often decide to value ad income over user experience. I deeply love the web for being an endless source of entertainment, inspiration, and learning, and I absolutely understand that people want to protect their user experience by all means.

But I want to protect them as well. Depending on how ad blockers work and change over time, my way of seeing ads may also decrease the chance of being blocked.

I can't offer hard numbers in a Service Level Agreement. As a one-person company, I can't ensure services are running (let's say I'm in a hospital, and the server goes down that same hour).

That means there is no guarantee that amcoustics.com is online, the banners will actually be delivered, or you have access to your "amcoustics customer backend".

That being said, in the last 4 years, uptime has been ~99,9%. That's less than 10h per year downtime.

My vision is to make the banners feel like news from the acoustic world. Restricting the scope to just one company would be counterproductive in that regard.

I list some features I think about or work on. This list is roughly ordered by my own prioritization (as of Aug 14, 2023). Please tell be what features are important for you to let me reprioritize.

• Show banners on small screens (mobile phones)
• Limit promos to specific pages on amcoustics.com
• Bid for an earlier slot in the ordering of the promos