So you have done it! Your website is a hit and is generating a lot more traffic than you anticipated it would. How do you keep the cost of hosting and scaling database storage from sinking your ship? In this blog, we will take a look at ways one can monetize their site to help absorb some of the new costs.
Advertising
Most sites that you visit have some form of advertisements on them. From the ubiquitous Google Search Engine to our coding workhorses Stack Overflow and Mdn Web Docs. As annoying as it can be to see advertisements scattered across a page, they serve the important purpose of keeping the page free for the user to navigate.
One of the easier ways to generate revenue is to begin hosting advertisements on your site. There are a few different techniques associated with advertising but they all share the same purpose- catching the attention of your users.
Pay-Per-Click
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an advertising model in which an advertiser will pay a website owner when the ad is clicked. The PPC technique is most effective on websites that have search engines associated with them. When users type queries into a search engine, advertisers can bid on keyword phrases that are relevant to their target market and have those ad links show up at the top of the result list. The ad company will then pay when the ads are clicked. If a site is more content-driven, banner ads are more common with a fixed price per click as opposed to a bidding system.
Cost per Impression
Cost per Impression (CPI) and Cost per Thousand Impression (CPM [M stands for the Mille, Latin for thousand]) is an advertising model where advertisers will pay a certain amount each time an ad is displayed. Instead of relying on a user to click your ad, which is not guaranteed to happen, you can receive revenue based on site traffic instead. A new metric has been established in recent years to address advertisers being charged for low-value impressions: viewable CPM. Now an ad is counted as viewable if at least 50% of the display ad is shown for over a second, or if a video ad continuously plays for over two seconds. This monetization method has led to the rise of clickbait articles. Some of the more egregious examples are articles that need you to click to another page to advance the article as you read it.
Google AdSense
Google AdSense is one of the most popular options because it takes most of the guesswork out of ad implementation. Simply create an account, factor your ad preferences and paste the following line in your code:
<head>
<script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com
/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client={CLIENT_NUMBER}"
crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
</head>
And there you have it. As long as the script is in any of the page components you want to have advertisements on, Google will automatically show ads in all the best places for your site. It achieves this with the Auto Ads feature. After implementation, Auto Ads will scan your site and will automatically place ads where they are more likely to perform better and generate more revenue. It also places ads based on page layout, the amount of content on the page, and other existing Google Ads. Below is an example of what one layout could look like:
With convenience comes cost and the payout is not as spectacular as you might imagine. However, every little bit helps.
Data Monetization
If advertising isn't the direction you want to go in, you can try your hand at data monetization. Users that visit your site are a wealth of data. From current location, spending habits, and demographic information, each user has unique patterns that can be harvested. Ethically, however, this is a very gray area. Individuals who generate the data have a claim to ownership of said data, as well as businesses that generate data through the course of operations(commerce over the site) also have a claim to certain data. Sites like Google or Facebook require that upon sign-up a user forfeits some ownership of their data in order to access their services. This collected data can be sold to different entities at a rate that is dependent upon the amount and content.
Paid subscriptions
The final method we will discuss is the subscription-based method. If you have a feature that you believe your user base would pay to have access to, you could lock the feature behind a paywall. While this method is a direct user-to-host finance exchange, one has to take extra care with its web security to prevent unauthorized access to the content. Signing up for a service should be as easy for the user as possible. To quote Jenifer Acosta in her article on GeekWire:
if it’s not easy to subscribe, users won’t bite. Friction is the enemy of subscription growth. A declined payment, a ten-step signup process, overly aggressive marketing or making it difficult to cancel can turn off a potentially loyal customer for good.
This approach is especially successful when it comes to news and gaming sites where the product itself is the content of the site, rather than items to purchase.
In Conclusion
There are many ways to monetize your website to enjoy the fruits of your labor. You just have to make sure to implement the methods that are right for you. Advertising, data aggregation, and subscription services are a few of the many ways to alchemize your traffic into gold.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monetization
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9261805?hl=en#auto_ads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay-per-click
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_impression
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_monetization
https://www.nichepursuits.com/5-simple-adsense-layout-examples-for-increasing-click-through-rates/
https://www.geekwire.com/sponsor-post/planning-to-implement-a-subscription-based-payments-model-here-are-the-key-steps-you-need-to-get-right/
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