How long should I expect it to take to get ads on a web site?

Question

I recently had an idea for a web site that I wanted to monetize. A big part of this site revolved around an infrequent conference which only happens every few years, and it just so happens I had about a week to get the site ready and ads on the site before the opportunity to have a large influx of visitors passed.

However, after managing to get the site finished, I am now running into issues with being able to quickly get ads deployed. An associated suggested Google AdSense and after a quick skim-over I just assumed that I would have to sign up, ad some code on my site, and I would be up and running. But now I am finding that Google claims it cannot see my site and won't tell me why (is it because I am https only and block http? is it because my site isn't index because Google doesn't know about it? i don't even see it attempting to access my site in the logs, and "am i up" sites all say they can see my site; now it's telling me I can't even get them to try again for 24 hours), and as I read more trying to troubleshoot this issue I find more and more trouble things like "You need to have at least 10 pages of content with lots of text on your site or it will be rejected", and "it could take up to two weeks for your site to be approved" (which I don't have, I barely have a week and that means I won't have any time to advertise my site beforehand).

So given this really tight dealine, is it realistic? How long should I expect it to take from when I sign up to get ads on my site until they are live? Is it just AdSense that has these restrictions, or are they universal? I looked at a few other places and some offer no info until you sign up (like I'm going to waste time signing up without knowing the details), and others suggest it can take a couple of days to even get approved, or have weird restrictions like they won't accept you unless you are not "beyond 1,000,000 Alexa rank" (what does that even mean? they don't accept popular sites? or is it unpopular sites?)

One place further says "I've read on their forum from an 'expert' that in order to get approved you should have a website which is at least six months old and with more than 50 articles." which if true means my plans are going to crash and burn with no hope for recovery!

Answer 1

Nobody can tell you when Google Adsense will be approved for your website. As per general guidelines, if your website has rich-text content on at least 10 pages, then you have higher changes of getting accepted.

Regarding other Advertising Providers, everyone has their own T&C. You just need to go through a platform where you can get the advertisements begin as early as possible based on the situation you're in.

(I currently do not have an idea about which advertising provider can get approved in one week, let us see if anybody else can suggest.)

Suggestions:

Since you mention, a large volume of traffic will pass through your website, have you preferred reaching out to companies that can benefit from advertising to this traffic?

Make a custom banner and advertising approach and charge accordingly? This might be too much.

Answer 2

That tight deadline is tough. You might be able to get AdSense up and running within two weeks. You certainly need 50 or more pages on your site when you apply. If you don't have that many pages, you won't be approved. AdSense needs that many pages to verify that they know what your site is about and that it meets their content policy requirements.

I've never seen the requirement to obtain an Alexa rank of 1 million or better before applying. It certainly wouldn't hurt to have a good Alexa rank, but it is not an official Google AdSense Policy. I would be very surprised if Google actually checks Alexa rank as part of the AdSense approval process.

The requirement to have a 6 month old site is country specific. If you are in the United States or Europe there is no such restriction. If you are in India or some other countries from which they get high volumes of hastily put together sites applying, then they have added that restriction.

Your site should have:

• 50+ pages
• A clean design
  • make it clear what the site is about
  • make sure the content on each page is front and center
  • include obvious navigation to the various pages
• Plenty of text
• A contact page
• An about us page
• A privacy policy

You shouldn't block HTTP. You should simply redirect it to HTTPS. Blocking it does nothing from a security standpoint. It doesn't protect you from a protocol downgrade attack. I'm sure that is the reason that AdSense can't see your site. They send an HTTP crawler.

When I applied to AdSense, I was approved within a couple days. It doesn't always take two weeks, but it could. Once you are approved, you will need to figure out how to generate ad snippets and put them in your pages. You might be able to use their new "auto placement" ads to make that easier. Otherwise you will have to figure out where to put the ads on each page yourself.

The biggest problem that you are going to face is that it often takes a bit of experimentation to optimize your ads to make any money. You'll need to experiment with colors. You'll need to experiment with placements. Without doing that work, your site may only make 10 cents for every 1000 visitors. After doing that testing, you might be able to get that up to a dollar or two.

I'm also not sure what "a large influx of visitors" actually is. I often see people with unrealistic expectations that they can make a lot of money by showing ads to a modest number of visitors. Google doesn't send payment until you make $100. To make $100 you usually need 100,000 to 200,000 visitors to your website. I don't know what type of conference this is, but most conferences don't have anywhere near that number of attendees.