How Broadband Wireless Exchange Makes More Money and Gives Readers What They Want

Google Website
March 1, 2003

Robert Hoskins is what you might call a subject-matter expert, and the subject is the fast-growing world of broadband wireless. His extensive meta-site, Broadband Wireless (BWE), www.bbwexchange.com, comprises 12 individual sites targeting specific areas including the various 802.11 standards, free space optics, and the valuable slices of broadband wireless spectrum. Each site provides industry news, stories, analyst reports, and product directories. Appealing to a growing audience of technical and business readers, Hoskins, who is Editor and Group Publisher, is getting 30,000 to 50,000 page views each day.

Approach
"At BWE, our mission is to help readers find information on the products and services they want to buy," says Hoskins. “Accordingly, our goal is to provide the most targeted advertising possible for our readers, and at the same time have it produce additional ad revenue for us." That's one reason he was pleased to discover that Google offers AdSense, a service that enables web publishers to display Google AdWords ads on their content pages.

Before Hoskins used the Google AdSense™ service, BWE was already serving ads, which the company's vice president of sales sold directly to vendors. But like many web publishers, Hoskins still had a lot of unsold inventory. Finding advertisers with ads that fit the specialized content of his site was not an easy task. Google AdSense seemed like the perfect solution.Hoskins opted to use Google AdSense to run AdWords ads on pages of all 12 sites under the BWE umbrella. As an entrepreneur, he switched hats from executive to programmer, and implemented his own ad code to the site. "It was incredibly easy," he says, "and took very little time to copy and paste the HTML in the right places."

"What we got from Google," Hoskins says, "was a much more sophisticated system that allowed us to effectively target readers who were researching specific equipment categories with advertisements, from companies that actually sold that type of networking equipment. So someone who was reading about 802.11 antennas would only see ads for vendors who sold 802.11 antennas."

As with any web publisher in a specialized market, this approach suits Hoskins’ business model very well. In running a Google AdSense skyscraper (a vertical format that features up to four ads), Hoskins reports he’s seeing an additional $3,000 a month in revenue. "These ads run in places that would have gone unsold – and we get revenue we would not have otherwise," he says. "Google has dramatically improved our ability to provide readers with extremely targeted ads. We have tens of thousands of pages that can now serve up advertisements directly related to the content our readers are researching."

For Hoskins, there’s a second important benefit: Google advertising effectively doubles BWE’s sales efforts. "Instead of spending money to hire an additional sales rep to sell ad banners to the correct target audience," he says, "Google ads have become a virtual sales tool for us, and it doesn’t cost BWE a cent. Now we’re able to reap thousands of dollars in additional advertising revenue each month that we would very likely have missed without Google AdWords."

In short, Hoskins says, "AdSense is a "win-win" relationship. BWE gets additional advertising revenue with little or no effort, and BWE readers see ads that interest them. And that enables our team at BWE to focus on our core business."

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