Should you offer self-service advertising on your website?
                     Should you offer self-service advertising on your 
website?
John Z
Writes on ad server, involved with Adspeed advertising 
platform & Adspeed Ad serving software.
Running a website, especially a high quality site, can take up a lot of your time. 
If you don’t have the funds to hire someone to run certain aspects of the 
business, it can quickly become overwhelming. One of the best ways to raise 
money to grow the business is through advertising on your site. But what if you 
don’t have the time to go out and find advertisers on your own? One option 
that is very attractive is to let advertisers come to you via your own self-service 
advertising program, which allows potential advertisers to go in and create 
their own campaigns without going through some other salesperson or a third 
party ad network or exchange. There are some very obvious benefits that 
come with going this route, which is what we are going to look at now, so let’s 
get right to it.
More control
When you get your ads from an ad network or ad exchange, you are tied 
into their pricing and the advertisers that they already have on board. You 
often can exclude certain categories but do not get to choose specific 
advertisers. Price and commission are set by the ad exchange and you have 
little to no control over that. When you go with a self-serve ad server, you 
are in total control of everything, from the price for each ad space to 
choosing which advertisers you actually want to be on your website.
Your website likely has many different sections and areas that are 
available for advertising and different ad placements with different 
dimensions. Therefore, ad rates vary significantly because of location, 
dimension and format. An ad on the homepage should be more 
expensive than an ad on a sub-section. An ad placement at the bottom 
of the page is less desirable than a top ad placement. A video ad is 
worth more than a display banner ad. Also, there is nothing worse than 
seeing ads that don’t really fit the subject of your site or even go against 
what your site is about. Therefore, having that level of control is unique 
to a self-serve ad serving solution.
Higher profit level
As we mentioned earlier, going through an ad network or ad exchange means giving up control of the 
ads you show. You also give up a significant percentage of your ad revenue as their commissions for 
providing the marketplace for advertisers. They offer you a rate and you can either take it or leave it. 
There is little to no negotiation power for a single publisher. If there is a problem with an ad, you have 
to go through the third-party ad vendor to get the problem solved, which takes up your valuable time. 
If you are a small publisher, you might not get the needed attention and issues might not get resolved 
in a timely manner. Going with your own self-service advertising system, you cut out the middleman. 
You can build a direct relationship with your advertisers that they will value while getting 100% of the 
ad revenue. However, you will need to be able to attract potential advertisers and retain existing ones, 
which often means having a high quality website and keeping it desirable for advertisers.
About Adspeed
AdSpeed ad server is a reliable & powerful ad serving and ad 
management solution that serves your ads, tracks impressions & clicks 
and reports ad statistics in real-time. Driven by the latest ad serving 
technologies, the goal of Adspeed adserver is to provide a reliable 
platform that can help in executing online advertising strategy more 
efficiently. 
Thank you for spending your precious time in reading this article.