Internet banner advertising is a mess. When my periodic table first went live in 1997, web banner advertising was not a few pennies per click. It was often a penny or more per impression. And for good reason: an agency knew its audience and a publisher only provided one spot to one agency. It was a relationship.
Large middleman ad agencies and an overabundance of publishers. If Google AdWords, Burst, and Fastclick can promise advertisers your site will be advertised on sites that contain your keywords while simultaneously promising publishers that if they have sites with your keywords, they will make money, what do you think will happen? Publishers will churn out sites with your keywords and put up a dozen banners. You have no control over it and half your money is going to the agency rather than the publisher.
If you are trying to reach students by guessing keywords like "homework" for your AdWords campaign, you may want to reconsider whether it is money well spent. This site, for example, does not mention "homework" once.
I would like to develop an old-fashioned one-on-one relationship with one advertiser. I've developed web sites for a decade. I don't want to defile my web sites with unrelated ugly flashing banners. I will accept one leaderboard banner from one advertiser to run full time or multiple demographically targeted banners. On any given visit to the periodic table, only one banner will be shown.
The greatest advantage of this one-on-one relationship is that we can craft a banner that appears to be part of the site, virtually guaranteeing it will not be overlooked. Imagine a visitor's shock to find that the advertisement not only knows where they are, but why they're visiting.
I honestly can think of no better way to precisely reach high school and college students than through a resource they will need to do their homework for a class required by every high school and college in the world.
Expect at minimum (except for around Christmas and at the beginning of summer) ten thousand views of your message per day. In the peak of the fall and spring semesters, expect 30,000 visits on weekdays, with 80% of those being unique visitors.
Absolutely. It's trivial to ensure any number of conditions are met. For example, would you like to pay a premium to ensure only unique visits are counted? Since this site is only one page, 80% of visits are unique and the remainder are either repeat visitors or those who've saved the site to their computer. How about only targeting Australian students? How about only showing your message to lazy students who are doing their homework after midnight their local time? Perhaps you only want to reach college students living in a dorm? Perhaps only students at Stanford? You can even combine restrictions, such as only British students who found this page through Google and are visiting Sunday night.
The specific CPM (cost per thousand impressions) or CPC (cost per click) is negotiable, though rates start at $2 CPM or $0.50 CPC depending on whether you're running a branding or sales campaign respectively. Compare the price to taking out an ad in a college newspaper for a day. At a huge college, maybe 10,000 people will see your message…for how much? I am a web developer, not a businessman or an ad agency; offer me what you believe to be a fair rate for your advertising campaign and show me you are an honorable company and I will accept it.