Web Sites with Unique Advertising Opportunities
Contributed by AlexTheBeast 
July 21, 2004 
Tagged: Internet
We have purchased spots on several web sites that offer alternative advertising methods to see which sites are the most effective. Here are the results.
We are not affilliated nor received compensation from any sites mentioned in this recipe…
Purchasing ad space is a tough decision for webmasters. Buying clicks from search engines is not only expensive, but it often requires huge downpayments as well. Often, beginning sites do not need ultra-targetted traffic.
Here at tech-recipes, we decided to explore some alternative ad methods. We purchased some nontraditional ads from a couple websites to see what kind of traffic they would generate. We tracked how many unique visitors the ad campaign generated and how many pageviews those visitors generated.
The first site is ubersite.com which allows people to post and vote on random content. For $1 you can post an text-link that is put in rotation atop the site’s web pages.
The second site is the popular fark.com that allows users to purchase a $25 text link for a week of viewing in its classified section. An added benefit of fark is that there is a comment section where you can discuss your site and other users can leave comments and suggestions.
The numbers:
| Spent | Days | Clicks | PVs | PV/click | cents/click | |
| Fark | $25 | 7 | 1167 | 7070 | 6 | 2.1 |
| Ubersite | $1 | 1 | 61 | 440 | 7 | 1.6 |
As you can see, both sites produced an excellent amount of traffic for around 2 cents per visitor. Visitors were obviously interested as they averaged viewing 6 to 7 pages each.
These ad campaigns became less effective the longer they run so it’s probably not fair to directly compare the averages of these two sites–likely ubersite got an advantage due to the short run cycle.
The important point is that these alternative ad methods gave us interested traffic much cheaper than the traditional ad suppliers on the net.
We will continue to explore sites who offer alternative advertising methods. If you have a site that has given you success or a site that has a particular unique ad idea, let us know. We’ll try it out and post our results here.