Okay... so I get an email this morning saying my website is nice and that some company in Ireland wants to put a banner ad on it. I say how much, and is it ugly, and they say it''s a nice banner and US$80 per month. Do I say yeah cool or do I say no go away? What''s the going rate for banner ads these days? My site gets 250k page views per week, with 60k unique IPs per week. Most of that traffic is to my javagames section, hence it being relevant here...

A friend of mine runs a site and charges $3.00 per 1000 impressions for banners. He get a little bit more traffic than you report.

If you charged the same rate, assuming that their''s is the only banner and is served on every page view then that would come to about $300 per month. So an $80 per month rate seems a little low to me. The CPM rate is the industry standard but it does require some work on your end to track it properly.

Negotiate. When I make offers of this type, I always start with a reasonable, but very low figure. Its good business to try to get as much as you can get for as cheap as you can. It sounds like these guys are trying that with you. Negotiate.

Aw damn... I made a counteroffer of $100/month.

What''s an ''impression''? Page view? Distinct IP over week/month/whatever? Non-consecutive IP?

Oh well... the guy was talking about having a one-month trial then possibly a six-month contract, so I''ll have to bump the price up between the trial and the longer-term arrangement... and do some more research.

An impression is 1 instance of someone''s banner being shown. If the add is shown on every page of your site, then impressions=page views. But if you have some kind of rotating banner system, then the page views may not equal impressions.

Woohoo! My cable works again! Damn Telstra... but their recorded ''our humans are busy, but as answering machine I can tell you to switch your modem off for ten minutes'' message worked. Apparently it''s happening to quite a few people.

Hmm... the dude agreed to the $100/month somewhat too easily. This leads me to believe he was indeed coming in somewhat cheaply for starters - then he wants to discount it to $500 for six months, which amusingly is about the $80/mo he shot at earlier.

What banner ad place is your friend with? I''m happier with banner shows than flat rate, seeing as it sounds like I''d earn about eight times as much and my page hits are fairly consistent. It certainly sounds like my current offer is lower than I could hope to get...

Irritatingly my website died sometime yesterday (with perfect timing, may I add - it''s been up for over a year, and now it dies just when it''s showing some cash potential). Grr. I''m fixing it now. Oh well... thanks for info!

From what he tells me, he manages it himself. Some kind of php/mysql setup.