bdmorgan

I'm a co-founder of a startup that is doing fairly well, 100 days in. Traffic is growing on almost a daily basis and unique visitors, page views, etc. - while not massive - are promising. I've been told that ad sales for sites with over 100K unique visitors per month are on another tier in terms of expected CPM and advertising credibility.

My question is: let's say our site is pulling 25-50K unique visitors per month of a fairly specific audience (demographic-wise). What would the HN audience recommend for our site to do, in order to maximize ad revenues? We've tinkered with Google Ads and some other options but, as traffic picks up, we're beginning to look into it more seriously. The difference between $0.25 CPM and $2.00 CPM is obviously huge, once traffic scales to a certain level. Do all of the ad networks pay the same (roughly)? Are all of the ad networks created equal or are there some we should reach out to that might be more selective, and therefore more rewarding?

Another related question (for those who have ad sales/buying experience): what should we project as an expected "going rate" CPM for a site with moderate traffic that reaches primarily college-educated males in the 25-50 age group?

Had lunch with potential business partner today. We outlined out plans to add in a host of premium features over the next 60 days. In August, certain features would be available to only "premium" members, who would pay a monthly fee.

The response: "You guys should really try to build traffic up for the next year - maybe two - and once you have that large audience, then charge for it."

I suppose that is conventional wisdom among many tech companies but the thought occurred to me....if I were starting a restaurant, would I be asked to give away free food for a year until people decided it was good enough to pay for? What if I open a T-shirt store? Give them away until the designs get popular, then charge for them?

The toughest thing about building a business online is dealing with this mentality that everything has to be free. How to get past this? A related question is: how to best present this cost to visitors and customers in a fashion that allows them to fully understand what they're getting? Anyone care to point out great examples out there of other sites that are successfully communicating their value proposition?

Mainly just posting here to avoid finding a therapist - the overall mentality has me pulling my hair out.

After about 9 months of development with my co-founder, we launched OnsideKick.com today. We plan to ramp up additional features and functionality over the summer and switch to a subscription service in August. Would appreciate any and all feedback from the HN audience!

http://www.onsidekick.com

I'm working with some top-notch developers on a new football site (http://www.onsidekick.com) that will launch on June 1. The good news is we've built a good, solid site. The maybe-not-so-good news is none of us are great designers...we each know enough to be dangerous. Where that has taken us is this:

http://beta.onsidekick.com/content/images/screenshot.png

That's the home page design at the moment...I'd appreciate any honest/brutal feedback from some good designers, particularly anything with some actionable thoughts. If you have any questions, post them here and I'll check back in.

If you're a football fan, swing by http://beta.onsidekick.com and send us an email to let us know which landing page you think makes the biggest impact.

We're using the LaunchRock service to publish our invite site - expect that to be live in about two weeks but any early feedback just on the graphic would be helpful. Getty Images is too damn expensive for us to go buy 8 of them :-)

I'm working on a site specifically focused on NFL and college football now. As I look around at various blogs and smaller sites, I see images of Tom Brady, Cam Newton, etc. that I'm assuming the sites just pulled from Google Images or something. On the other hand, if I take a look at what it costs to actually license images from a service such as Getty, it seems prohibitive for any startup. So, at his point, I'm really confused as to what to do. Are 98% of the sites out there just displaying images with no regard to licensing (and, evidently, no legal action is being pursued)? Is this a "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" type of thing? ...Or is there some fabulous free image archive that I've yet to find?