Todd picked up the latest review auction I had, for BuySellAds. I’m actually glad he did, because his service aims to look after the medium to long tail of the web. Where, contrary to popular belief, there is still a lot of money and exposure to be made. Some would argue that cutting out the middleman in today’s world is so easy, especially with the wide range of tools available to monetize your site.

Well let me ask you this - If you don’t have a connection to a pool of advertisers, how exactly do you plan on monetizing your blog or website?

A lot of the bigger boys in blogging, general web sites too, tend to do a lot of their own advertising transactions. This probably means they hire someone full time to do so. I think 98% of bloggers don’t have that luxury. But a lot of the bigger boys also don’t cut out the middle man, in fact they frequently partner with them to make sure they always have their inventory full. {Naturally so, because they have payroll to make, which you have the luxury of not worrying about}

So while there are both sides to this argument, as everything in life, there is no reason that both cannot co-exist. Especially when it comes to the opportunity to make money, you should never look at one more option to do so as not being favorable.

BuySellAds is a favorable option for making more money with your web properties, Todd graciously provided me with an invite to sign up as a publisher {currently only advertisers can sign up}. It took me all of a few minutes to go through the process and install the code on my sidebar.

I can set my own price, they take a 25% cut, and the number of banners I want to sell per zone I set up. For instance, my sidebar zone sells site wide banner ads for $50 a month {which is $0.001 CPM, OMG!}. I’ve set the maximum width and height at 300 x 250, I can set the number of ads I want to rotate in that zone and the maximum amount of ads I’m selling for that zone, which is 2.

I think those are some pretty nice features to have, especially since I can sell more inventory per zone. I’m assuming the ads will rotate evenly? I would make a suggestion here though to Todd, and that is to have a preset range of standard banner sizes for publishers to choose from.

Some other features for publishers include -

• You want the benefits of selling ads through a marketplace but don’t want to pay high commissions (their rate is 25%)
• Automation - from accepting payments to putting ads live and then taking them down, the entire process is automated
• They sell your ads as subscriptions and they renew at a higher rate month-to-month
• You can cash out whenever you want, it’s your money

Overall I think they are doing a good job of giving bloggers and website owners more options to monetize their sites. Adbrite has a similar system, but there your price fluctuates on various other factors that most of the time don’t make sense. BuySellAds does show stats from Alexa, Compete, PageRank, Delicious Bookmarks, Technorati rank and Yahoo Backlinks, which are updated once a month. Though they do not play a factor in deciding your ad rate.

Advertisers too, I’m sure, will find a benefit in this system. You are free to look at the sites before you buy and know exactly where you will be placed, size of the ad, rotation if any, etc…Many sites in the system have a low rate presently, including mine, so you’ll be better off getting in early and grab the good spots before they’re all gone.

Sign up here for BuySellAds.

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.