Advertisement rates and advice? Please help!

[mschiano]

Hey guys, first timer here, so I appreciate any help you can offer.

My partner and I are currently running a very undervalued website. And by undervalued, I really mean Google Adsense isn't giving us quite enough money for the type of traffic we're pulling in.

So let me tell you some numbers.

Our site is bringing in about 1.2 million unique visitors per month and it's been growing about 100k uniques per month. According to Adsense, our averages for May are as follows:

CPM: 0.17
Impressions: 11,149,457

Now, I've done alittle research and apparently, that CPM should be more like 1.00. I'm not quite sure what we're doing wrong, and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Our demographics tend to be male and female of the ages 15-24.

So my question (or questions) for you are, are we really undervalued? If so, what numbers (in terms of CPM) should we actually be doing? Should we ditch Adsense to run our own advertising system?

Also, based on 1.2 uniques a month, if someone wanted a static text link on every-single-page, what would you suggest we charge them?

Thanks for your time, and thank you for any help you can contribute.

[cscgal]

The first thing that I noticed is that you said that your demographics target ages 15 to 24. From the perspective of advertisers, this target age group (teens and college students) don't have much money - and they're certainly not big budget spenders with lots of discretionary income. I think this is a big reason why you're not able to pull in higher CPM rates ... it's simply not worth it to many advertisers to spend a lot of money targeting this age bracket.

Keep in mind that many AdWords advertisers (the advertisers who appear on your AdSense) are products and services for sale. You may have better luck selling inventory yourself to content sites who make money selling advertising (such as DaniWeb) where the site visitors don't have to shell out big bucks.