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Be honest -- can you really afford to pay $500 or more a month for a freaking banner ad? Or to squander a smaller amount on an ad the size of a postage stamp?
Of course you can't. That's why you should advertise on Splendid. When you advertise with us, you'll reach legions of adventurous, genre-hopping music fans (more than half a million unique user sessions per month as of March 2005) for the price of a modest binge at the CD store.
Consider this:
- Splendid has been online since 1996. That's almost nine years -- an eternity in Internet terms.
- Splendid is known and respected worldwide as one of the highest-profile online sources of new music reviews, articles and interviews.
- Since 2001, Splendid has published new content daily -- seven days a week! We're talking ten or more reviews, articles, interviews, streaming media and more -- plenty of reasons for readers to see your ad again and again.
- We are a small, privately owned, thoroughly non-corporate publication. When you advertise in Splendid, you are supporting small business.
- Splendid's open-submission, everything-reviewed policy means more reviews of more new music than you'll find anywhere else.
As you can tell, Splendid is primarily a music magazine -- not a bunch of half-assed articles bundled together as an excuse to sell advertising. Accordingly, the quality and readability of our content comes first. We offer only one banner ad size (468x60) and one banner ad placement (top of the page) per page. This means that our guaranteed impression count is lower than many of our competitors, but it also means that your ad won't be lost in a sea of flashing logos and cycling text. We've seen sites with up to nine ads per page. Who's getting their money's worth there?
Ad banners are stored in a database on our server, and are randomly loaded with each new page view or reload. This gives each advertising banner an equal degree of exposure on the site. We guarantee a minimum of 30,000 impressions per ad per month -- that's a conservative figure based on a full slate of ads (24) and a page view count from 1999.
Your ad will appear on the main page of the site, all main section pages, all new reviews, articles and department pages, plus all archived content published after November, 1999 -- in short, all of the major traffic-generating content on the site. Our most popular older feature articles have also been retrofitted to include ads.
Our target advertisers are bands, record labels, music festivals and record stores, as well as associated materials like books, music-oriented DVDs, et cetera. We reserve the right not to sell you an ad if we feel that your product does not meet our readers' range of interests. We do this for your protection as well as our own!
We're not a budding megacorporation, and we're not asking you to pay office rent or finance a coke habit. Splendid is a serious and professional endeavor, but we're not making our living from it and we don't intend to. That means we don't have to gouge your ass for more than a banner ad is worth; we just want to cover our operating costs, while offering you a full-size banner ad and a healthy impression count. Check out our very reasonable rates:
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R A T E S (valid 1/1/04 to 5/31/2005)
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| Small Independents |
US$60.00/month |
| Larger Independents (you know who you are) |
US$90.00/month |
| Large, Evil Corporations |
US$120.00/month |
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We now accept payment via PayPal, making it even easier to purchase ads in Splendid. for our Paypal address. Effective December 10th, 2003, there will be a $2.00 surcharge added to Paypal payments to cover Paypal's increasingly exorbitant processing fees. We're sorry about this, but ever since EBay acquired PayPal, they've been gouging the shit out of us.
If you are paying by check, please make your check payable to GEORGE ZAHORA -- not Splendid. We don't have the whole DBA situation sorted out just yet.
You say you want to advertise but don't have the resources to design and assemble a banner? No worries. We'll create one for you for no additional charge. We're actually pretty good at it, though we're not the speediest designers in the world.
Please note:
- Ad file size is limited to 30K (preferably smaller)
- .gif or .jpg only -- no Flash ads, please!
- We reserve the right to decide who is and isn't a Large, Evil Corporation
- Lower rates are available if you purchase in multiple-month blocks
- If you design your ad, it can be changed as often as you wish, with 24-hour notice. If we design your ad, you are limited to one design for the run of your purchase.
- We reserve the right to refuse any ad that contains content we consider inappropriate for Splendid. This might include products with which we do not wish to be associated (i.e. Britney Spears albums), spelling/usage errors in your ad, images of graphic sex or violence, or just plain stupid-looking ads.
Questions? E-mail for further info, or call 630.205.3863. We look forward to hearing from you. And readers, take note: if you see an ad running on Splendid that, in your opinion, compromises the principles we've outlined here, feel free to .
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