I'm the publisher of http://compellingsciencefiction.com, and I'm working toward achieving financial stability for the magazine. Readership has grown to the point where I'm putting out feelers regarding tasteful ads, and the model I'm testing right now involves individual companies sponsoring stories. The idea is that a text ad will go directly under the story title/author name, with contents that look something like "This story was made possible through the financial support of <company>. Sign up for their service at <company website>". My theory is that having your company name on a story would do more to foster goodwill and name-recognition than other types of ads. I believe people will be grateful toward companies that sponsor the content they love. I don't have any data to back this up yet though, because the issue we're releasing in the first week of December will be the first time we've tried this model.This model is limited by the number of stories we publish -- right now two out of our five stories are already sponsored. The going rate is $360 for a story. The most interesting part of this model is that the sponsorship will last forever, so even in the future when our userbase is larger people will still see that you sponsored the story when they go through our back issues. That means the value of this sponsorship is unbounded.
Please send me an email at [email protected] if you'd like to sponsor a story in our December issue or would like more information! Please feel free to provide feedback in this thread as well, I always welcome the advice of experienced entrepreneurs.