Part 1 : Site building and advertising

Ralph, you have a staggering array of hockey information and statistics at the site - would it be fair to say that you're a BIG hockey fan?
That could be an understatement. I've been watching hockey games since I was about 5 years old - my father used to take me to see the Springfield Indians of the AHL and the Hartford Whalers of the WHA. I've seen games at the NHL, WHA, AHL, IHL, CHL, UHL, and NCAA levels.

You've built a 1,000,000+ pageviews site on the back of your interest and hobbies - how much time and money do you need to invest to keep such a resource going?
Time is the larger of the two factors - the data I have gathered took most of the past 5 years to collect. That was the bulk of the work. I now spend about 3 hours a day just answering e-mail, and probably 20+ hours a week digging up new data to incorporate into the site.

As for money, I need to earn the hosting fees that I get charged plus the cost of my syndicated content (the current season stats which are disabled because we're between seasons). I'm lucky in that my most popular pages are usually under 5k in size, which keeps the hosting costs down. But as the site grows, the hosting fees grow as well.

I spend a lot to obtain the programs and guides to stock my site with information, but it's really all part of the fun of running the site. I would say that the advertising allows me to break even when you figure in all my expenses. Believe me, not everyone is getting rich off the internet!

Do you sell advertising yourself, and, if so, how has this worked out for you?
I have only found a few sports-based retailers who have both the technical savvy and the vision to use advertising. Most small retail sites take the position of "since your users want my stuff, you should give me a link".

However, the advertisers who have directly worked with me are not disappointed - since they're geared to target hockey fans, they get a lot of attention.

What are your views on third-party ad networks - are they the ideal solution for websites like hockeydb, or do they come with their own problems? What kind of cpms can a webmaster expect to get?
The trend in the ad network industry right now seems to be to favor unique visitors. No network will tell you their ad-serving algorithm, but from my experiences along with discussion from other site owners, I think that if you have a lot of repeat visitors that view 20+ pages per session, you will not get paid as much as if you have a lot of one-time visitors who view 2-3 pages per session. This seems to contradict the philosophy of building "sticky" sites.

On the one hand I can understand that the ad networks need to give the advertisers what they want - the advertisers are the ones with the money. But the advertisers are clearly taking advantage of the publishers right now - running CPC campaigns that are designed to get their name out instead of to get clicks, using redirects on their sites to "trap" users there once they click through, limiting CPM ads to 1-2 per IP address, and even swapping in provocative banners in the middle of a campaign when they control the third-party ad server.

I can't quote my CPMs because of confidentiality agreements, but I can say that the $30-40 CPMs that you see are nowhere near reality for most sites. Heavy discounting takes place from those rates. Too bad, because the high prices probably scare off the little guys. With defaults factored in to a site's effective CPM rate, it comes out to be very low.

Continued...