Someday you might have someone approach you or be in a position where you’d like to determine advertising rates for your website or blog. How little or much should you charge? One way for site owners to get a general idea might be to look at the public information that ad brokerages like Federated Media already provide. With each author profile Federated Media shares the traffic and prices for various ad types and sizes and it groups them by automotive, business and marketing, media and entertainment, mobile, momentum, parenting and tech.

Using Google Spreadsheets, I created a spreadsheet with the FM tech advertiser information and then sorted the information by text ad price and traffic. Some of the FM sites don’t provide prices for text ads, so those fields are left with a zero value. I left off sites that didn’t provide traffic numbers. I then exported as csv and whipped up a quick PHP script with the data put in an array so that webmasters can enter in their traffic in the form below and see where they would fit in the FM list as of 9/2006. I’m not likely to update this script unless it gets a lot of use and/or feedback.

Really don’t need to use that script, you can just eyeball the screenshot above or use the spreadsheet below to see where your site would fit. The minimum amount of monthly unique traffic shown for any FM site appears to be 10,000 uniques per month or roughly 333 unique visitors per day. Some of the FM prices for websites seem a bit low and many seem too high based purely on the traffic numbers, but it’s wise when purchasing and pricing advertising to look beyond traffic to type of audience, relativity, locale, longevity (permanent archive placement or transitory?), type of campaign and interaction with site, etc.

Download spreadsheet (fm_publishing0906.xls).

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