Squeezing Revenue out of my Content Site

What more can I do?

[lorenzinho2]

So I'm working on my budget for 2004, and I'm getting depressed. I just don't see where the revenue growth is going to come from. I'm hoping to hear what's working for other folks, and to gain a little focus / inspiration.

First the background: I run a fairly large online community where users can sound off on a wide variety of topics like Politics, Consumer Products, Travel, etc. During a good month, we get about 200K visitors and 2.5M page views. This traffic is dispersed over a massive number of pages (more than 100K). About 5% of my visitors generate 90% of my content. About 40% of total traffic comes for free from Google, though that figure seems to be going down.

My principal revenue models today are as follows:

- Sponsorships - text links placed on a run of site basis
- Sale of content - we sell/license content to Web sites looking to add user / consumer generated content to build community, improve sales conversion, etc.
- AdSense
- Sponsored links through a third party provider

- We don't run banners for aesthetic reasons
- The affiliate model, originally expected to be our biggest source of revnue when we launched in 1999, has been a complete dog - labor intensive to implement on an item to item basis, with terribly low conversion rates.

Things that I am considering for 2004 include:

- a subscription service, in which subscribers would have access to a couple of enhanced features such as customization tools for the pages they create, an ego boosting icon next to their user name, and the nice feeling of supporting a site they are passionate about (I hope).

- a more robust, self service, link buying tool that would allow advertisers to impulse buy links, or batches of links on relevant sections of the site.

- an rss based content push / subscription model where sites hungry for content to subscribe to snippets of related content.

The name of the game for me is to keep the labor intensive pieces down, so I can focus on driving traffic, doing the admin/business stuff, and responding to my user base.

Does anyone have experience with any of the three ideas that I'm considering? Does anyone have a sense of the respective ROI for a content site with the levels of traffic mentioned above?

Thanks in advance.

[hanuman]

don't do subscription it will lower your user base. I dont like to change good things, and your traffic sounds good. I suggest - Do events.

Arrange meetings for dinners. promote it as bringing the online community to real life friendship. it will 1. foster your own site community and 2. give you some profit from the tickets sales.
here are some numbers. tickets sold at 35$ with cash bar at the restaurant. your actual cost is 25$ so you can make a 1,000$ for every 100 that appears.

do silent auctions.

and last. get high value items from your sponsor. put it on a raffle and sell tickets. you get the cash your sponsor get an exposure for his product. you mentioned that your site is also travel oriented. get a cruise pack value 5K and sell 300 raffle tickets for 40$. the cruise company got a great pr trip, the winner a great holiday trip, and you just earned 12000$

do memorabilia shop.

[lorenzinho2]

Thanks for the suggestion, Hanuman. Events would seem to be a logical extension for an online community. It's a little tricky in my situation because of the geographical dispersion of my users, as well as the broad range of subject matter.

Another suggestion that I received via sticky mail was a links directory - paid inclusion for some sites - which is also interesting.

[werty]

Create a store, full of nothing but affiliate links.

Create a Newsletter and sell advertising in it.

Create a directory and charge for people/sites to be listed in it.

Create a Personals section, or "merge" with a personals site and get a % of the signup fee.

[macrost]

google.com/adsense One quick thing that I can think of.

Mac