Advertising

Boost your website’s traffic by advertising on bigfoto.

Your own 150 by 150 pixels jpeg or non-animated gif can appear on one of our pages permanently, without being rotated.

Most bigfoto web pages have up to 12 adverts at the end of the page. We offer a range of prices, with the top left position being the premium spot. It costs less than you might think – why not contact our advertising manager today to discuss your requirements with no obligation to proceed.

We offer the best results for sites that are photography or travel related, but other types of websites are also welcomed.

There are just a few restrictions:
Gif-ads must be non-animated.
Your site must be in English; we do not accept ads for porn sites, for sites that contain violent images or promote criminal activities, or from hacker sites.
We use nofollow on these advertising links.

Contact by email: [email protected]

Internet Advertising

It is difficult to remember that until 1991 there was no advertising on the internet – in fact on the earliest versions of the net, its use for commercial purposes was banned. Things change so fast in cyber space that by 2012 in the USA alone online advertising was reckoned to be worth $36 billion and increasing at 15% a year, damaging the revenue of traditional advertising platforms like commercial TV and newspapers. Advertising techniques also develop quickly as technology improves – here are some of the methods employed:

Banner Ads: The first online banners appeared in the early 1990s at the bottom of web pages, and banners first became clickable in 1993, as website owners tried to make their investment pay.
Search Ads: In 2002 Google introduced a search advertising program that sorts search adverts by a combination of bid price and data about the behaviour of searchers.

Targeted Ads: Online businesses use cookies to track individual internet users’ activity, so that they can present them with ads they are likely to be interested in. The cookie tracks whether a potential customer left a site without buying anything, in which case the advertiser can later supply them with adverts for the site the user visited. Some internet users find this targeted information useful, while others regard it as a breach of their privacy.

Social Media: One of the newer methods of reaching customers is to use social media like Facebook and Twitter to increase traffic to a website. The aim is to get users to share content with their social contacts, thereby doing the advertisers’ work for them for free. Their friends may be more inclined to accept information from a social source than from the company direct. If a message can be presented that will “go viral” the advertiser picks up a massive bonus in terms of free exposure worldwide.
Blogs: In 2012 there were more than 130 million blogs in existence, and only a few of them had really massive followings. Companies use blogs about the activities of their company to promote their products and increase sales. “Sponsored Posts” are blog entries that link back to the website that the blogger is promoting for financial gain.

Networking sites: Websites such as Linkedin allow companies or individuals to create profiles and link to potential customers or business partners. Their pages enable businesses to promote their products and services to people who are already interested in their field.
Business Directories: These are hardly “new media”, but rather online versions of the old fashioned book directories of businesses. The biggest difference is that the printed phone books covered a relatively small local area, whereas on the net you can find a directory like Yell for any geographical area you like.
Spam email: The name of this type of unsolicited advertising material is believed to derive from the sketch on British TV in 1970 by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The original spam was certainly a brand name for canned pork and ham imported from the USA into Europe after World War 2. The point of the joke in this sketch is that spam gets everywhere, and in the 1980s it suddenly became a term for the huge amount of unwanted emails sent out en masse by unscrupulous companies trying to make money from the internet. Most spam (also known as “spamvertising”) these days goes straight into the junk folder, but it continues to be used by some advertisers, mainly because the costs are so low. In 2011 it was estimated that seven trillion spam messages were sent over the internet.

Hyperlinks: In this in-text form of contextual advertising, key words in a text are linked directly to the website of the advertiser: if you are interested in the ad you can click through to the site to see more about the topic.
Review sites: Sites like Trip Advisor, trustedreviews.com and ‘Epinions’ invite shoppers to read reviews of products and services before they buy. The difficulty with such sites is that you can’t always tell whether the reviews are genuine or planted by the business concerned. In some cases user-review sites are reluctant to post negative reviews because they are dependent on income from businesses advertising on their site. If you know that the site, like the Consumer Association’s ‘Which?’, is genuinely objective, then review sites can be very useful to the buyer and represent free advertising for the company.

Getting Paid
Website owners need to make money, both to cover their costs and to make their business profitable. Very few follow the example of Wikipedia, which eschews advertising and relies on requesting donations from its users. Some of the ways to collect revenue from websites are:

Fixed cost: the advertiser pays an agreed fee to have their banner or display ad online for a fixed period. There is no refund even if the users’ response is not great.

“Cost per Mille”: is a kind of fixed cost deal where the advertiser pays for a set number of displays or “impressions” of their ad on the website. The technology can enable the advertiser to check that the agreed number of impressions is in fact delivered.

Cost per click: the company signed up for Cost per Click (or Pay per Click) pays the website owner for every potential customer who clicks on the banner or link back to their site – it is up to them, then, to convert this visit into a sale.

Cost per Action: Cost per action or Cost per Acquisition means a deal is made for how much the advertiser pays the site owner for a number of visitors performing an agreed action, such as making a purchase or registering on their website. This method of payment shifts the risk of losing the costs of advertising onto the website owner.

Whatever the type of advertising and however the website owner chooses to charge, the low cost of electronic media means the internet is likely to be cost-effective for adverts compared to other media. When you add in the fact that ads can be targeted even to individual potential customers, you have a winning formula.