I'm resposible for a youth traveling basketball web site.  We're a small, non-profit organization and we've talked about approaching some local businesses about advertising on our site.  They would be small, banner-type ads, but I have NO idea how much to charge for them.  We don't care about making much money, we just want to offset a few costs.  If anyone has experience with this, I'd sure appreciate the help!

Paul

I'm just looking for a ballpark figure as a starting point because I really have no idea.  Lets just say hypothetically that there are 200 visitors per month.  What would be a fair price to charge?  $20.00 per month?  $50.00??  I want it to be a fair price, I'm not out to gouge anyone.  I just want soime kind of figure so when I approach a business I can give them a price, then they can negotiate lower if they wish.

Paul

Thanks for the help, and $5 per month sounds fair.  I'll have to watch the statistics for a while to get an accurate count.  One thing in our favor ... the people using the web site are kind of a 'captive' audience; they have to use the web site to get practice schedules, tournament locations and schedules, etc.  I hope will be a potential selling point.  I plan to approach local sporting goods stores, maybe car dealerships, and anything else I can think of that might be interested.

Paul

I'm not real confident in this reply, but it might be a start at what to look at:

Hits is pretty much irrelevant because it includes every little graphic that goes onto a page. 

I've also considered Files irrelevant for about the same reason, but I haven't figured out what's the real difference between a Hit and a File.  Maybe Hits counts every request made to the server, while Files only counts the hits that actually resulted in a return: i.e. if a requested file was not changed since its last retrieval by that visitor, then it isn't sent and thus isn't a File. That's a wild wild guess.

Pages would be useful to your advertisers, because it is supposed to count the number of page views by your visitors, so you could calculate the average number of real pages viewed per visitor. However, the stats programs on your server consider many file types to be Pages that should not be counted. For a text site, you probably only want HTML pages to be counted as Pages. On your server, you cannot define what counts as a Page, but if you install a stats program like Webalizer on your own computer and run your access logs through it, you can, and the results are a lot more useful.