When You Should Not Sell Ads Directly

Most writing about selling advertising directly is produced by people who sell the tools for it, this post included. So here is the other side, stated as plainly as we can manage.

There are four situations where direct sales is the wrong answer, and in three of them an ad network is not a compromise. It is the correct product.

1. You cannot describe your readers in one sentence

This is the one that actually decides it, and it has nothing to do with traffic.

A direct advertiser is buying access to a specific group of people. If the most honest description of your audience is "people interested in technology" or "sports fans", there is no advertiser looking for exactly them, and the buyer who would pay a premium does not exist.

The test is whether you can finish this without hedging: my readers are ______, and they are here because ______. If both blanks need a paragraph, you are not ready, and a network that sells your reach on the open market is getting you a fair price for what you actually have.

2. No single slot gets 10,000 monthly views

Below that, an advertiser running for a month gets too few clicks to tell whether it worked. Two clicks and one click look the same. A buyer who cannot measure a result cannot justify renewing even if they liked you and liked the site.

That is 10,000 on the slot, not the site, so a smaller site with one slot on every page can clear it comfortably. But if the honest number is two thousand, you are selling something the buyer cannot evaluate, and the second month will not happen.

The workaround, when the audience is genuinely valuable, is to sell time rather than impressions. A month of your sidebar for a flat fee does not require either side to count anything.

3. You will not spend twenty minutes a week on it

Direct sales is not much work. It is not zero work.

It is approving what came in, glancing at one number, and sending one email a month to somebody who advertised last month and has not booked this month. Under half an hour. But it is half an hour that has to actually happen, and a portal nobody checks becomes an advertiser waiting four days for approval, which is the same failure that loses the deal in the first place.

Zero work is exactly what an ad network is for. There is nothing wrong with wanting that.

4. Your current contract does not allow it

Some managed monetisation companies require all your inventory, because their model depends on controlling the whole page. If you are with one of those, that contract decides this, not your preference.

Worth being precise about who this is and is not. AdSense does not require exclusivity and never has, so you can run direct sales alongside it. The exclusivity clauses live in managed monetisation deals, and they are in the contract you signed rather than in anybody's public policy.

The one that is not on the list

"I do not have any advertisers yet" is not a reason to stay away, and it is the reason most publishers give.

Nobody starts with advertisers. They start with an audience somebody wants to reach and no way to complete a purchase. The first advertiser almost always comes from one of two places: somebody who already emailed you and got a slow reply, or a business already advertising in your niche who has never been asked.

How to tell in thirty seconds

Has anybody ever emailed you asking about advertising on your site?

If yes, even once, you have direct demand you are currently sending away, and none of the four situations above applies to you. If no, and you have been publishing for years, work through the four honestly. Two of them are probably true, and knowing which saves you a month.