bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

Tonnes of businesses unlock the flesh in a market, Google Adsense unlocked the flesh in the online advertising market, Ebay in secondhand goods, Skype in phone calls.

By reducing the flesh consumers benefit from a competitive marketplace.

Although there is a lot of competition in online advertising I still think there is a lot more flesh that can be unlocked.

Companies like Google Adsense, Kontera, Commission Junction will have millions on their books from the earnings of users who do not reach the payment threshold (which is a reasonably common occurrence).  

Their terms usually dictate they hold onto the cash till you cash out or your forfeit it within a certain amount of time.  You are never likely to recover those earnings.

My idea is for a charity or potentially Kiva to setup a programme whereby users donate their past earnings for these programmes.  

They then group these together and cash them out.  Alternativelly it could be a business opportunity, similar to the tax refund model, give us your account details we will get your earnings out and take a 25% cut, as hey if you didn’t do it you get nothing otherwise.

However I think companies are more likely to co-operate with a charity, great pr move for them, users feel great AND charity benefits. Win/Win/Win.

Monetising your web service has been a topic I am forever intrigued with and been bouncing around as a blog post for a few weeks now.

Given recent discussions on Twitter I thought I’d grab this out of drafts and post it.

In terms of monetising your service, what options are there?

Freemium
Idea is provide a free service with a premium model where loyal fans pay for extras.  The inherent problem is creating enough value in the premium option to swing users to pay (creating status is key).

Ads based
Make money off advertising, default is to use adsense.  Problem here is this is based on large volumes to cover your services.  No good if your starting out.

Glue ons
Features to your site that are actually of value to your users.  I call them glue ons.  You glue on a new feature (if your users like it, it sticks, if not it falls off).

Examples include: Job Boards (where people pay to list), Toolbars (which generate revenue help user), Consulting Time/Services, Ebooks/Book…

Long tail of monetisation
There are lots more: donations, blog sponsorship / paid blogging, selling links, cross selling, special one off content, limited edition merchandise

However….

Looking at all of the options think anything that helps your users is likely to help you.

A job board that helps your visitors whom will need a job at one time or another, a paid fan club that gives me extra benefits (and status) that no one else gets, access to special reports that other have to wait 3 months for.   Think about what you can glue on.

Hows this.  We always hear to identify your core users and target them.

They are your most profitable.

You would think that this relates to purchasing of merchandising or buying products/services.

However I have found it also applies to consumption of advertising.  O you say.  Well…..

Recently we transferred StillSpoiled to WordPress.  During this transition we were removed from the google index.  We get roughly 95% of our traffic from Google.

Our traffic took a hit.  Thinking adsense would as well i investigated.  However this was not the case.

Check out these numbers:

I took a 16 fold decrease in traffic! only to see my earnings drop 40%.  My ECPM in fact went up 10 fold!

These have been fairly consistent.

ECPM adjusts by Google automatically calculating the quality of these clicks.  A higher ecpm means higher quality clicks (and therefore are purchasing/profitable for my advertisers).  Ie my core users aren’t just clicking they are buying.

It seems my core users who have bookmarked my site, know it by name and visit regularly consume the most advertising.

(Most of the advertising sells merchandise to tv shows we write about, so relevance is a factor)

This makes sense if you think about it, in theory my passionate fans will be most willing to lay out cash. Turns out this translates to advertising.

Question is now, should i set noindex on the site? Therefore only letting people find me via word of mouth.

Seems it will be more profitable.

Maybe you should deindex for a fortnight to identify your core users.