If you offer advertising on your site, do you offer exclusive opportunities? Let me back up a step. I was recently contacted by someone who wanted to advertise a product identical to a current advertiser. They even wanted to use similar anchor text. I declined (yes, I turned down money!) unless they could offer a different product or completely different anchor text. The advertiser-to-be emailed me back, asking if the first advertiser (the one with ads already up on my site) had paid extra for exclusivity, and even told me that they were willing to compete with the first advertiser via my sidebar.

For the record, I don’t charge extra for exclusivity, but do people actually charge more for that?

The way I look at it is that I don’t want to hurt a relationship with a current advertiser to make a new advertiser happy. If I’m already working with a company that sells the Whozit Whatzit Widget, and another company comes along, and wishes to advertise that exact product, I’m going to have to turn them down. I feel I owe the first advertiser that, even if I didn’t charge them extra for exclusivity.

The other reason behind that is that I don’t want my advertising to be boring. I want each text link I sell to be unique, so that it doesn’t make my sidebar repetitive and boring. Do I really want three different links to three different sites selling the Whozit Whatzit Widget in my sidebar? Of course not. (I should point out here that currently, there ARE similar links, but they’re from the same advertiser.) I do have a gray area on my rule though - if three directories wanted to advertise with me, I would accept all three, because my readers could use all three sites. Make sense?

So the big question here is, do you charge people more money to be an exclusive advertiser?