Press Publisher - Magazine Publishing Software

As publishers, we are all familiar with the importance of advertising: traditionally, the companies who paid to put their name in a periodical were the main way to cover publication costs. The Internet’s changed that by reducing the costs and increasing relative revenue. But do online publishers still need to do the leg-work to find advertisers? And is it worth it?

In the last blog entry, we mentioned that online advertising expenditure has overtaken its television equivalent. This isn’t a passing trend – it was reported by Spiegel-Online for the United States in 2008 and this year by the IAB for the United Kingdom (along with several other, smaller economies in the interim). Those figures have yet to surpass the spending on print advertising, which means that – as an online publisher – you benefit from the best of both worlds.

That answers the second of our opening questions: is it worth it? The figures show there’s an enormous amount of money circulating in the virtual world – and some of it could be headed to your bank account if you include ads on your site.

But what about the leg-work? Thankfully, the big advertisers make it very easy to place banners or ad blocks on the published page. Systems like Google’s Ad Manager – which not only links to AdSense, as one would expect, but to other providers as well – give you the tools to simply decide where you would like the ads to appear, and leave the rest to them.

The advantage of this is that the provider will find appropriate clients and feed their adverts to your site. Their systems analyze your page content and figure out what subjects you cover, then match those with keywords the advertisers use. Only those ads that match will be sent to your site and, for every click, some extra revenue comes your way.

Combine this with PressPublisher’s built-in support and it couldn’t be easier. If you’d like to start including some advertising on your publications, we suggest starting with the three video tutorials available from the home page (or follow these links to Part 1 and Part 2 for banners, and Part 3 for blocks).

The latest edition to the Press Publisher system is the ability to include banner ads (and Google Ad Manager integration) on your site so you can start monetizing your online magazine.  Built into the templates are specific blocks for including the JavaScript code from any number of ad management software applications. Some of the most notable advertising solutions are:

• Google Adsense, which are basically Google ads that allow you to show text and image based ads that are “contextual” to the page you are on.  This means, the ads should be reflective of the content on your page.  This is a good thing.
• Google Ad Manager.  This is a banner management system recently introduced by Google.  It allows you to control the ads that show on your site.  You can create ad blocks and include banners from your clients.  If you don’t have any client ads, you ad blocks can default to show Google ads.  A nice feature to make sure there is always and ad up and showing.  It is robust and comprehensive solution.  At the present time there is no fee, but their service states they have the right to change that.
• Open Ads.  This is a long standing, open-source banner management system (that’s been around for a while).  Just like Google Ad Manager, it provide complex control over the presentation of ads on your website.  Down side?  It is simply too confusing for some users and can be over the top in terms of features for the basic publisher.

With all of these solutions, you are provided with a small JavaScipt to include in your site.  We now have a section on the site that provides you with the blocks to copy and paste this code into.  Now it’s time to start getting some people to your site and make some money!