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Rick's Rants: Dollars.com is Live! (November 2004)
by Rick Latona, Dollars.com and CJBucks.com
This is an exciting article for me - an article that has been over two years in the making. The task has taken much longer, and been much more difficult, than any of the people involved could have imagined at the time we set out to create a totally new, original concept in commission-based advertising. But, today, I'm thrilled to invite the entire adult webmaster community to join Dollars.com, and learn for themselves how RPM technology and unprecedented statistical analysis can help monetize your traffic.
Dollars.com began with a simple premise: as a publisher of commission-based advertising (a webmaster), your inventory is not how many clicks you send to a sponsor or how many sign-ups you generate - your inventory is your impressions.
My partners Marc Womack, Paul Dinin, and I run ConsumptionJunction.com, which generates the bulk of its revenue from publishing ads and sending traffic to sponsor programs. CJ serves billions of ad impressions every month, and at any given time is actively promoting a hundred different sponsors. That's a hundred different stat programs to log into every day; a thousand different payout structures and metrics to balance; ten thousand sites to choose from; and millions of banners to fill billions of ad impressions every month. As many of you are no doubt already aware from your own businesses, choosing the perfect sponsor, payout, site, and banner to promote amongst the millions of possibilities is a Sisyphean task involving so many different combinations and permutations, even Stephen Hawking's head would explode.
But it's also a task that everyone in the industry - big players and small players alike - must face.
We hired a longtime friend, Ryan Hogrefe (CJ Ryan), to manage the affiliate advertising on CJ. The last few years of his life have been spent reviewing stats reports, reading newsletters, switching out advertisements, and using his best judgment to determine what sites will make the most money with his traffic - a job that you or someone in your organization performs every single day. I don't hesitate to say that Ryan is one of the best in the industry at judging which sites will generate the most income, but the tools presently available to him - and all webmasters - limit them to making decisions based primarily on intuition.
"I've got a good feeling about this site."
"I think this is a good looking banner."
Or…
"The conversion ratios with this program have been great."
That last quote hurts me the most. Conversion ratios, click-throughs, and high payouts are absolutely meaningless without knowing the amount of impressions required to generate them. For example, if Smut Site A has a 1:300 conversion ratio and Smut Site B has a 1:500 conversion ratio, assuming they both offered $40 payouts, which would you promote? Smut Site A, obviously.
Wait…
What if Smut Banner A required 10,000 impressions before a surfer clicked on it, and Smut Banner B required only 5,000 impressions? Now, Smut Site B is the better choice. Furthermore, take into account different payouts, raw clicks vs. first or second-page uniques, potential shaving, uptime, the IPSP, the stability of the company…and multiply that by the hundreds of different sponsors competing for your traffic.
You see where I'm going with this. Pardon this brief lapse of professionalism, but it's a clusterf#*k, and one that every person in this industry confronts daily, whether you're building and submitting galleries or you own a huge a sponsor program trading 5,000 joins at a time with your outbound traffic.
This is how Dollars.com and RPM propose to solve the problem.
Dollars.com monitors all aspects of a commission-based advertising transaction. It serves the banners (through a cutting-edge NationalNet server farm), hosts duplicate tours of thousands of proven quality sites (from Lightspeed, TrafficCashGold, SexMoney, PornKings, EpicCash, Naughty America, OxCash, Capital Bucks, CJ Bucks, and more), and processes the joins (a custom integration with Epoch/Paycom). Because of this, Dollars.com can draw reports and statistics based not only on the click-throughs, conversion ratios, and payouts of a sale, but also on the amount of impressions needed to generate it - that missing element, which has (until now) rendered the precise value of your ad inventory unquantifiable.
The name of this value is RPM, or Revenue-Per-Thousand (Impressions). Anyone familiar with old-school dotcom advertising metrics certainly recalls that the term CPM (or Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions) is used for determining how much an Internet publisher charges a prospective advertiser for advertising space on his site. RPM, however, determines the exact revenue generated from one thousand impressions, and this metric can be applied to all elements of the transaction. The RPM of a thousand banner impressions; the RPM of a thousand tour impressions; or even the RPM of a thousand cross sale impressions. Simply put, open up a page where you publish ads to commission-based sponsor programs. Refresh the page. Do you know how much money you just made? That's RPM.
And only once you've determined the RPM of your traffic, can you begin to tweak and monetize it. One thing many people found particularly insightful during the live Dollars.com demonstrations I've been giving for the past few months, is when I sort a list of sites according to Conversion Ratio, and then sort it according to RPM. The two lists are almost entirely different, confirming our contention that the impression count is crucial to realizing the salability of a site you plan to promote.
RPM aside, Dollars.com offers other great features:
- Free Hosting of all banners
- A centralized Reporting System and Control Panel from which you can manage any banner or text link you've ever created.
- Integrated Fraud Controls
- Fully rotating and weighted zone/banner structure, allowing you to rotate multiple banners and ads within.
We're all part of an industry that has never been afraid to innovate. From the VCR, to exit consoles to the affiliate program… Often, those innovations are closed and only available to those who invented them. We offer you now a B2B advertising exchange for all to use. Everyone is on the same evenly fair playing field. All programs' hits are counted the same. No program can shave, due to the fact we read the processing data dumps. This is a truly efficient marketplace where the better product wins, and all bullshit is cast aside.
Now that we are officially open for business, we will begin adding more affiliate programs (we call them advertisers) so you will have even more sites to choose from. During the next six months you will see us launch a barrage of products and services to help you make more money. This is a massive project and we are working as fast as we can.
We plan on completely taking over, so learn the system and you'll make more money.
Finally, I'd like to talk to you about support. We've contracted for a 24/7 call center to satisfy all your needs and concerns. E-mail support@dollars.com for immediate satisfaction. As soon as the phone system is installed we'll be publishing 24/7 phone numbers that you can call as well. In the meantime, e-mail us your phone number and we'll call you to answer any questions you have.
Rick Latona's company started with Consumption Junction and has turned into a powerhouse delivering tens of billions of banner ads and text links monthly through a network of free adult sites. Each of his sites has strong consumer brands that generate bookmarkers and a loyal fan base. Recently we've seen him launch Dollars.com which as a B2B advertising exchange only puts him in charge of even more traffic. Visit www.kblogger.com for more of Rick's tips.
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