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Many of the most useful publishing formats and many of the most widely used sites are hard to effectively monetize.
The solution is to use targeting technology and blend ads and content so closely that they appear to be one and the same. Many people have pushed this from many different angles.
This is somewhat of a rambling post about the merging of content and advertising.
Offline Ad Integration
I recently went to a hospital with a friend. While I was there I flipped open some magazine published by WebMD and read what was perhaps the most basic article on bipolar disorder ever written. The page long article had pictures added to make it two pages long, so the content wrapped around an advertisement for a bipolar drug, and there was even a quiz in there, which was not quite as overt as this Effexor one, but still pretty bad.
How Bad Does Google AdSense Suck at Monetizing Contextual Ads?
Many months ago as an experiment I created a backfill AdSense ad group where I bid a dime a click. Many of those ads appeared on Digg and MySpace and lots of blogs. The overall group had a 2 cent CPM. 19,083,546 ad views cost me $338.01.
Individual publishers can focus their content on expensive topics, but they still can’t push the ads too aggressively in their content to their regular audience without losing some of their credibility and exposure.
Bloggers & Smaller Independent Publishers
There are many different takes on how individuals publishers can profit:
* Sell products or services, like I do here. The easiest thing to sell is something associated with your brand. Nobody is going to get mad at Discovery.com for promoting a Discovery toy store.
* Dave Winer suggests using authority and influence for indirect profit
* sell ads: contextual, brand ads, keep your main channel clean while creating an associated offers section on your site, or some combination.
In many verticals advertising is overtaking the other monetization models. You only need to think back to the Wordpress Mesothelioma fiasco to remember how much people are willing to trade in their brand for a few dollars, and as long as Google puts a $0 value on your content then advertising is going to beat out paid content in most fields.
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