Need advice on placing banners or affiliate links on website..

[PokerPaul]

Lets say you have a website which gets frequent hits. You do not have to do tons of advertisement to it, people just intuitively type it in. For example, if you owned the domain poker.com, you know people will just type it in to see what comes.

How would you go about making money off that?

More specifically, would you place straight advertising banners on the site and charge the vendors monthly fees? Alternatively, would you simply place your own affiliate banners on the site to party, empire, etc. and hope enough people signup through them to make it worthwhile?

I think poker.com used to charge something like $2500 per month for a banner on their frontpage, and if you can place even just 4 or 5 banners there, thats pretty good revenue.

So, all things being equal, what tends to make more $$ in the long run, affiliate banners or space rental banners.

[GrannyMae]

So, all things being equal, what tends to make more $$ in the long run, affiliate banners or space rental banners

i'm sure you knew this was coming, but the answer is
"it depends"

as an example, if the owners of this forum chose to replace the banner space they sell to individuals with affiliate banners for their own pokets, i would say that they would make 10 times the money. otoh, being an affiliate comes with risks so they choose to take the legally safer route of just selling pre-paid space.

using your example, if i had the domain poker.com, i would make it a personal affiliate farm because a name like that will get thousands of unsolicited hits a month. but to feel safe, i would also have move out of the US if i had a banner farm at poker.com

if i owned a name that was not so powerful, i would probably go for the sure money of selling space.

the name would really have to be something like poker.com to get all those free hits tho, and all the decent variants are already taken so i am not sure what you have to work with.

2+2 is the 9700th busiest website on the internet, and all of the traffic is "qualified", so it is a great place to advertise. you could find places that get high hits (like playboy.com), but starve to death with a gaming banner there.

your question is more complicated than it appears on the surface.