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facebook, twitter, yelp, blogs/content - the more you monetize, the more annoyed your users are
there's an inherent tension between the success of the product and the success of the business, which is problematic especially as you scale
the only significant exception is google
This post has a very naive understanding of online advertising. Here's a breakdown: - If you're thinking of advertising in terms of just slapping on some Google Adsense then you need high amounts (millions of users per month) of traffic to make reasonable money. - If you're thinking of specific kinds of targeted advertising, this can be very powerful depending on your niche. If you can hire a sales team to push adver…
Not really. The post talks specifically about "just putting ads on", which means we're talking about something like AdSense and not the more lucrative options you mentioned which involve a sales team.
The fact is, you'll need a really high amount of visitors to make any decent amount of money through AdSense - especially if you have several employees and investors who need to get their share.
The post is right on the money. No doubt there are certain forms of advertising that are effective - but the point made by the post is that slapping AdSense on your startup's pages isn't going to cut it.
This post has a very naive understanding of online advertising. Here's a breakdown: - If you're thinking of advertising in terms of just slapping on some Google Adsense then you need high amounts (millions of users per month) of traffic to make reasonable money. - If you're thinking of specific kinds of targeted advertising, this can be very powerful depending on your niche. If you can hire a sales team to push adver…
I have a site that has around 4-5m visits per month, yet all attempts to monetize it have failed. I'd love to use Amazon's referral program or Google Ads, but I can't because the site's content is somewhere between reddit and 4chan - deemed too shady for anything else than porn ads. So, the site still remains a hobby project - exactly as when I launched it 6 years ago.
Maybe you need to look at a different model though ? Sort of like reddit gold, premium memberships, or some other services that may somehow add value to your site ? It's often surprising how many people are willing to pay $2-$10 per month for something!
If you really mean 4-5m million visits (and not pageviews) I'd love to take a look and see if I can help you figure out some sort of solution. Send me an email (addrress is on my profile).
for me, the main issue with ads as a business model: they make the product crappy facebook, twitter, yelp, blogs/content - the more you monetize, the more annoyed your users are there's an inherent tension between the success of the product and the success of the business, which is problematic especially as you scale the only significant exception is google
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a site that has around 4-5m visits per month, yet all attempts to monetize it have failed. I'd love to use Amazon's referral program or Google Ads, but I can't because the site's content is somewhere between reddit and 4chan - deemed too shady for anything else than porn ads. So, the site still remains a hobby project - exactly as when I launched it 6 years ago.
If it's a forum style thing then discussion systems with a high number of pageviews per unique visitor (vbulletin/reddit/etc) will generally have very poor advertising revenue. Maybe you need to look at a different model though ? Sort of like reddit gold, premium memberships, or some other services that may somehow add value to your site ? It's often surprising how many people are willing to pay $2-$10 per month for…
The site is http://pr0gramm.com/ (NSFW) - mostly german visitors and yes, it's 4-5m visits, not pageviews. It's kinda impossible to define what a "pageview" is on that site anyway.
When you're getting involved in a startup, it is incredibly important that you be honest with yourselves and your partners about what the goal really is (this is to the point made the other day about self-awareness) and what you're really building.
A Feature: A piece of a piece of a puzzle. "It's like Facebook's News Feed, but instead you get audio updates instead of text updates!". Hackers can be guilty of this often - focused obsession on improving the world (or a piece of it) by tackling even the smallest problems. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not necessarily a guarantee of success.
A Product: Instagram is a product. It's full-featured, it's beloved (or was ;), it's free-standing, it works, and people use it. But do people pay for it? Would they? Would they make money by themselves or only in the context of a bigger company (like Facebook). Twitter is also a product, along these lines.
A Business: 37signals is a business. People pay them to use their products. They are free-standing, they are profitable, and they don't _need_ outside investors (need vs. want is different, btw - sometimes it makes sense to take strategic investment).
There's nothing inherently wrong with any of the above paths, btw. But you need to understand which path you're on, because you'll do a better job of it that way. If you decide to be on the feature/product path and hope to get acquired/acqui-hired, that's fine - it's a legitimate approach (that works, at least for now) and folks have made $billions doing it (see: Instagram & everyone else).
But it's a different path than starting a business. Goals are different, operations are different, and outcome is different.
The point, in the end, is that often the response - "well, I guess we'll sell ads" is what people who are starting features or products often say to convince themselves or others that they're on a worthwhile _business_ endeavor. And that's often dishonest (intentional or not).
Understand the path you're on and I'm willing to bet success will be more likely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's a forum style thing then discussion systems with a high number of pageviews per unique visitor (vbulletin/reddit/etc) will generally have very poor advertising revenue. Maybe you need to look at a different model though ? Sort of like reddit gold, premium memberships, or some other services that may somehow add value to your site ? It's often surprising how many people are willing to pay $2-$10 per month for…
There's no email address on your profile :) The site is http://pr0gramm.com/ (NSFW) - mostly german visitors and yes, it's 4-5m visits, not pageviews. It's kinda impossible to define what a "pageview" is on that site anyway.
When we were first working on Kazoo we had thought our monetization would come from a service we called "promo calling". Basically we would detect the caller ID of where you were calling and place an ad for a competitor on your phone display with a coupon and a call to action of rerouting your call to the alternate vendor.
It just pissed people off.
We ultimately settled on a premium SaaS model but my point is this: try lots of stuff. A lot of it will fail, but failure is simply invalidating one incorrect hypothesis. Try lots, fail fast if you're wrong and roll to something else.
The key for us is that our core values didn't change. We still want to build amazing telecom systems, it just took us a while before people would pay for them.
Disclaimer: I am the community manager for http://2600hz.com