Replacing Affiliate Ads with Direct Ads

I am upgrading the Community Color Web Sites to PHP 7. I am also replacing MySQL with SQLite3 and upgrading to HTML5. It's a big project that I hope to complete this week.

As part of the upgrade I will replace the Adsense Ads and Affiliate Ads on the site with direct local ads.

I like the basic concept of affiliate advertising. A site with a product to sell offers a commission on sales. Web sites run their ads and get an occasional commission.

There are tens of thousands of merchants with affiliate programs. These merchants offer millions or products.

I believe that affiliate marketing is a good thing. Because there are so many products, web sites can run ads for things they support without compromising their message.

The problem I have with affiliate marketing is that the huge networks that offer affiliate ads aggressively track user activity. These use the information they gather to manipulate user behavior. They often engage in activities that undermine the sites that run their ads.

I believe that my sites are well enough established to break from the clutches of the big marketing firms and that I will be able to replace the ads. Currently, I have over 10,000 page views a day. My 10 year old server freezes up when I have more. I believe the new new server and improved code will be able to handle a hundred times more traffic.

I decided that the best way to handle local advertising is to sell the ads in blocks of 100,000.  I am currently getting about $30 for every 100,000 page views. Since I will bill in advance, I decided to charge $25 for every 100,000 page views. This is a super low rate of 25¢ CPM.

The new site will go live in a week or so. I would love to have a few people buy ads before the site goes live so that I can tweak the program.

The ad is a 728x90 banner that is in the upper fold of the page (between the page title and contents). I put text ads in a stylized SVG block. You can pre-order ads on my test server.

Use this form to order text ads.
Use this form to order a banner ad (you need a link to a 728x90 banner).

The ads won't go live until I switch to the new server which I hope to do soon.

I only have 10,000 page views per day (which I've split into targets). I only want ads related to the target. I don't want to show ads for Denver Lawyers on the Moab Real Estate page. The flow of the program is as follows. A person orders an ad. If I have a relevant target, I will approve and place the ad.

Some time after the new site is live, I will send the user a payment request using Paypal (Paypal accepts Visa, Mastercard, etc). The request will show the ad placement. If the person is happy, they can pay the bill. If not I will remove the ad. I am using a delayed payment instead of a money back guarantee.