For site owners who have plans of selling ads directly to premium advertisers and weaning themselves off of ad networks such as Google AdSense, one of the first steps in the process is developing a media kit that offers a “snapshot” of your property and audience. This process can be intimidating if you’ve never done it before, so we’ve put together a guide and template. (By the way, MonetizePros members enjoy access to our Media Kit Generator tool, plus other monetization tools, insider reviews, and in-depth e-books: click here to sign up.)
Below is a step-by-step guide for creating a quality first draft of a media kit, including the resources used for various features of the document. You can view a PDF of our media kit, or open up a Google doc that can be edited to include your site’s information. (We don’t mind.) If you want some additional inspiration for an extended media kit, check out our feature article, Seven Media Kits That Make it Rain.
We used the presentation option within Google Drive to create our PowerPoint-stye media kit. This is basically a cloud-based alternative to PowerPoint that can be used by anyone with a Gmail address. We selected one of the dozen or so pre-loaded slide themes (Paper Plane), though there are several sources of additional templates if you want to get even fancier.
Cost: Free, though you’ll need a Gmail account to create presentations (instructions here).
For capturing and editing pictures of your site, Awesome Screenshot is quick, easy, and free. We were able to take a picture of one of our more popular tools to include in the media kit, as a way to highlight the type of content that’s found on our site.
In addition to taking basic screenshots, this tool lets you crop, add text and shapes, and blur out any information you don’t want to share:
Cost: Free.
IconFinder has a huge library of icons that can be downloaded for free. There are some premium ones as well that sell for a few dollars apiece. We used this resource to find and download the icons used throughout our media kit to highlight various aspects of our audience.
Cost: Free for many of the icons, with some premium icons available for purchase (generally for $1 to $3).
Google Analytics is used by just about every major website to provide statistics about traffic. Once a line of code is installed on your site, you’ll get detailed information about how many visitors are coming to your site, what they’re doing while they’re there, and why they eventually exit.
There are dozens of metrics available from Google Analytics that can shed some light on the nature of your audience. Ideally, you’ll be able to identify a few that identify your audience as engaged, loyal, and fast-growing. Some to consider include:
Time on sitePageviews per visit% of Return VisitorsAverage Visits per MonthMonthly Unique Visitors / PageviewsGeographic LocationCost: Free.
Quantcast can be used to get additional data about a site’s audience that Analytics can’t provide. The demographic information is pretty basic, but it’s enough to give a good snapshot of the audience coming to your site. Metrics available include:
AgeGenderEducation LevelHousehold IncomeQuantcast can be up and running on your site in a matter of minutes, though you will need a bit of time to collect meaningful data about your audience’s demographics.
Here’s a sample screenshot of the Quantcast data for Goodreads.com:
Quantcast can provide additional detail into each of these categories, and also shows some of the other Web properties your audience likes, as well as trends over time.
Cost: Free.
In this media kit, we decided to include prices for each of the ad units available. Some publishers may not wish to have this information publicly available, preferring to share pricing info only when a serious request comes in. But if you do want to include, you may want to do some research on what reasonable rates for your niche are.
BySellAds, which functions as a marketplace for publishers looking to sell their premium inventory, is a good resource for researching appropriate CPMs.
Cost: Free (to browse at least).
Using only the free resources highlighted above, we were able to put together what we think is a pretty decent media kit that highlights our site and gives potential advertisers a good understanding of the value in promoting their products and services here. Feel free to flip through the presentation, or copy and edit the entire thing to showcase your own site.