I'm investigating ad serving software. Google has a product, acquired from DoubleClick, called DFP. They've divided it up into a free "small business" version (too small for me) and a premium DFP version which probably meets our needs better, but which I suspect is quite expensive.
Does anybody know how much DFP typically costs?
I finally got through to a junior saleperson at Google... the kind of guy who kept answering my questions with "well, the Account Executive could tell you this" because he was obviously just a screener.
He told me that a ballpark would be $0.10 per 1000 impressions, with a monthly minimum of $5000, but it's pretty obvious that they negotiate heavily so YMMV.
Update, July 2011: We've been using a startup called AdZerk to serve ads on the entire StackExchange network for the last year or so and couldn't be happier... it's about half the cost of Google DFP and does many smart things to serve ads fast.
I believe at my last company we were paying over $100,000 a year for a 5 year contract and that was to serve between 30 and 100 million impressions a month. We also had access to video serving and some other features that precluded us from using the free version or even the updated Googleized version that was release recently.
We were using the old IE only interface. Works well, but the UI is horrendous.