If you own a niche website and you get, or expect to get, good traffic, you should consider including advertising on your site, both as a way to increase your income and to provide additional interest and information to your visitors. However, you should not allow that advertising to get in the way of your site's message or you could to lose both your visitors and the advertising.
If you are a marketer or advertising manager, you should consider using niche web site advertising as an excellent opportunity to speak directly with people who are likely to be most interested in your product, service or idea.
Definitions
You can define advertising as that element of the marketing communications mix that uses "paid for placement" communications directed to a defined audience containing information about products, services or ideas in a way that provides information the user or consumer needs to make an informed buying decision.
Media is the term used to define the broadcast elements used to transmit the information to the target audience.
A "target audience" consists of those selected elements of the population the advertiser believes could best benefit from or have an interest in the information (news) he wishes to communicate.
Since advertisers pay the media to transmit their messages, their "ideal" media would be one whose total audience consisted only of people who have a need for the advertiser's information.
History
Beginning in the 20th century, individual media have arisen that provide advertisers with broader audiences (radio in the '30s and '40s; television beginning just before the '50s) and narrower audiences (the proliferation of targeted trade and consumer publications following World War II).
The Internet
The Internet, or, more specifically, the World Wide Web, has become the newest advertising medium, providing access to both broad (worldwide) and narrow (niche) audiences. In both cases, Internet advertising provides marketers with an opportunity to communicate directly to those people who need or can use this information.
Advantages of Web Advertising
Individual web site owners have discovered that advertising revenue not only can pay the cost of their websites, but also can generate additional revenue. Advertisers have discovered that niche web sites approach the definition of the ideal medium, letting them communicate directly to their target audience at the lowest possible cost (fewer impressions wasted on people who couldn't care less).
A New Paradigm
When dealing with conventional media, advertisers pay to place their advertising in front of an audience and hope the audience reads or watches it. The developing Internet advertising paradigm says the advertiser pays only when the prospect takes some predefined action. With "pay-per-click," for example, the advertiser pays only when the prospect "clicks" on his ad.
