A future with ads on amcoustics.com

There are some usual ways to pay for ad space. The most typical are: CPM (cost per mille) and CPC (cost per click).

• CPM means I set a price for 1000 impressions (a few cents per impression).
• CPC means I set a price for one click (a few euro per click).

Why 25eur 10eur CPM?

I did a lot of research and carried together CPM, CPC and other prices for banners of different websites, both generic ones and those in the audio and acoustics world. You find anything between a CPM of 5 and over 100eur.

Comparable websites (audio and acoustics related) charge around 25eur (CPM) for a 300x250px banner. I would simply join that market price but to get the whole thing up and running asap, I will charge the first 3 companies just 10eur CPM for the first year.

While 25eur seems to be a price audio/acoustics websites can charge, the average is lower. Facebook and instagram charge around 10eur on average. Google is difficult to compare as you pay per click there (CPC).

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

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.

Two reasons why I chose CPM over CPC

• Firstly, I think it is less "error-prone" to use CPM. If a user clicks the banner unintentionally, the ad customer pays for it, and the price can be felt (euro dimension). When I count an impression directly before the user leaves, it is much less of a problem (cents dimension).
• Secondly, I find it hard to come up with a fair CPC price as I have no own click numbers yet. I also found fewer CPC numbers to compare against. Most of the page or ad providers sell by CPM. The biggest one, google, sells by CPC, but there are so many variables, including a bidding process, that I am less confident in using their numbers.

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 newsworthiness of your offering, I will set up accounts on my ads-backend for your company.

For now, the banner setup will work 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 optional parameters for each banner depending on your goals

• a title and description for your campaign (This is only for you. You will find this information in the "customer cockpit" service that you will get access to keep track of your banners and their statistics)
• a start and/or end date of your campaign
• a maximum budget after which amcoustics.com stops to display your banner
• a list of countries you want the banner to be displayed in.

After you give me the go, I will enable the campaign.

In the near future the setup will work like this

As said, I am doing the configuration for now, but soon you can get "promo manager" accounts for the promo-backend. Promo managers can create, upload, edit, enable, and disable ads for your company directly.

You will still be able to get accounts that can only read the data.

Note that I will still approve every banner manually before it can be displayed on my page. So, as soon as one of your promo managers has uploaded a picture, he can send the pic for approval. I get an email and will try to approve (or send a message with the concerns) as soon as possible.

First of all, it helps not to call things "ad" when it comes to ad-blockers (I hope there are no promo-blockers ;)).

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.

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, you only pay for page views that include your banner.

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 campaign is active
• you want the banner to be displayed in the country the page view is coming from
• your optional max budget has not been reached

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. But you pay only the first impression.

It happens like this:

When the user loads a page, my server decides on the banners to display. The visitor's browser gets the banners list and loads the first one. Only after this banner is fully loaded and displayed does the browser tell the server that it has successfully displayed banner1. The server then counts this as an impression that has to be paid by the customer banner1 belongs to.

When multiple banners are shown after each other in one page view, this procedure repeats for the different banners. As soon as the last banner has been displayed, the browser displays banner1 again. And again, the browser tells the server about this impression, but only one impression per page view and banner is charged.

I don't want to set a minimum budget/time from today's perspective.

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, even if only a handful of people from their region get to see the advertising resulting in just some cents income for me.

A minimum budget would help me finance my setup work for that one company, but I prefer to hold on to my vision and instead try to set up new customers and campaigns as effortlessly as possible. What helps is my experience as a developer. My backend is highly automated, and customers will be able to do more and more in self-service in the "customer cockpit" I have built.

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 count an impression only after the banner has been displayed, a blocked banner will never be charged.

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", but you will only be charged for the banners, that have been delivered.

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)
• Creating and updating promos by ad customers
• Limit promos to specific pages on amcoustics.com
• Bid for an earlier slot in the ordering of the promos

I am working hard to make the content on amcoustics.com feel balanced between correct, easy, fun, and high-quality. I thought about this quite a bit and have decided not to let the usual ad providers place arbitrary ads in between. Being a heavy internet user myself, I know that too much spam decreases joy and receptiveness. It simply would interfere with what I want amcoustics to feel.

That's why I want to

• talk directly with the companies to ensure ads are relevant and make sense for all sides.
• provide the necessary features to let companies easily decide on the time, regions, and cost of their ads.

Yes, this is much more work, and maybe it's less money, but it feels right. And in the end, it's just about how it feels ;).