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I'm wondering how premium ad networks (The Deck, Carbon Ads, Fusion Ads, etc..) calculate the payout for publishers. The problem is they have a fixed price for a fixed timeframe (30 days or a week) instead of the classic "for N impressions" price, so how they assign the payout to the whole network?

They have usually 15-30 sites in a network and costs about 1500-2000$ (a lot more for The Deck) for a 30 day campaign. How they could give these high payouts everyone is talking about, even if (I suppose) their cut is 20%-30%?

And suppose if they don't fill all the available ad slots for one month, the payout will depend on how many paying advertisers they have for that month? Could be possible it's so variable?

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The answer is that it depends. I run RubyRow a network on a much smaller scale then all of the ones you listed here. We do our payouts based on a revenue share - so the publishers see the ups and downs of our sales cycle. We do have a couple of publishers that are paid a fixed amount per month regardless and those are higher risk but worth it to keep those publishers as part of the network.

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Thanks James, that makes sense. Keeping a couple of "big fishes" with a fixed amount may be a good idea! Regarding payouts, are they calculated on sites performance (eg. cpms) or a fixed percentage of the total revenue? I know about your ad serving company, I have some questions about it, where should I contact you? thanks – Andycap Aug 24 '11 at 10:21
We back our campaigns into a CPM and then give a fixed percentage of that to the publishers. So lets say we sell a campaign for $300 for 30 days. That's $10 a day. On a given day lets say they server 10k impressions, so that's $1/CPM. If a publisher served 1,000 of those ads they would get 60% of the $1. We have this all automated of course (in Adzerk). Please email me at james at adzerk.com if you have questions about Adzerk. – James Avery Aug 24 '11 at 12:46
Thanks James, I'll catch you by mail. – Andycap Aug 24 '11 at 13:10

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