Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've decided to go back to the fee concept and leave some AdSense ads on select pages.
Maybe enough people have realized that you get what you pay for, are tired of the free word farm content pages and are willing to pay for good & useful information not available elswhere.
We'll see how this works out.
FarmBoy
I wish you luck, from your posts, I get the impression that you are running a quality information site. Just not sure hiding content behind a paid wall will help, and assuming you get a lot of your traffic from organic search, there will be a trade-off.
Interesting timing. I hope you do better than the New York Times did with their Times Select, which they just stopped a couple of weeks ago.
The NY Times circulation is in decline, they have to issue a string of corrections on almost a daily basis, there are blogs pointing out the inaccuracies or incomplete articles each day and there are numerous other places a person can go and get the same opinions as those held by the columnists who were available at Times Select.
It's not an apples to apples comparison to my site. Not even close.
Did you consider any other publishing options, like an insider subscription newsletter or e-books? Do you have any direct site sponsors?I wish you luck, from your posts, I get the impression that you are running a quality information site. Just not sure hiding content behind a paid wall will help, and assuming you get a lot of your traffic from organic search, there will be a trade-off.
All valid points/questions.
It's something I have been thinking of for several months and I'm only doing it with this one site as a test.
I have sites other than the 2 mentioned in this thread where my model is I focus my time on having good useful content for my visitors, I sell access to the content for a premium price, offer a handsome percentage to affiliates and then I don't really make any efforts at getting organic traffic.
I do OK with that model. The most important benefit is the earnings are consistent - almost dependable.
I steered away from that model on some new sites when AdSense came along. In the beginning the rewards were very nice but now it's less reliable, less rewarding and less consistent.
In the real world, I used to work as a consultant. A mentor once suggested I double my prices. I tried it and it worked. I lost half my clients but I made the same amount of money and with fewer clients, I had fewer headaches.
In a roundabout way, I'm applying that approach to a web site.
Like I said above, we'll see what happens.
FarmBoy
I wish you luck, from your posts, I get the impression that you are running a quality information site. Just not sure hiding content behind a paid wall will help, and assuming you get a lot of your traffic from organic search, there will be a trade-off.
I've thought about this same thing...my luck I would get one guy, that paid, who would copy and paste all the stuff on a free forum or something though...
I've thought about this same thing...my luck I would get one guy, that paid, who would copy and paste all the stuff on a free forum or something though...
I used to fear that. And whether you're writing content for doctors, lawyers, plumbers, or candlestick makers, there's always some guy who thinks it's his life mission to steal content and provide it to others.
However, I've found that along with having a lot of free time, these people usually aren't very bright. It's usually easy to find it, get it removed and give the offender a slap in the face. Sometimes he'll even get discredited within his industry.
FarmBoy
The NY Times circulation is in decline, they have to issue a string of corrections on almost a daily basis, there are blogs pointing out the inaccuracies or incomplete articles each day and there are numerous other places a person can go and get the same opinions as those held by the columnists who were available at Times Select.
Whatever you may think of THE NEW YORK TIMES (and your prejudices are pretty obvious), the fact remains that NYTimes.com got rid of Times Select for one simple reason: It's confident that the incremental ad revenues from added page views will exceed the $10 million a year than it was earning from Times Select subscriptions. That's hardly surprising, considering recent growth in the online advertising market generally, online newspaper newspaper advertising in particular, and the NY Times Company's own online ad revenues.
Now, maybe you're right in assuming that you can earn more from subscriptions than from advertising. If that's the case, it doesn't necessarily mean that subscriptions are better--it could just as easily mean that you've been leaving advertising money on the table.
Good luck, and would you give us an update later on?
It's not an apples to apples comparison to my site. Not even close.
You're right, it isn't and apples to apples comparison.
There are lots of sites that make good money on the subscription model, but there are a lot more, a whole lot more, that fail big time. The biggest problem is publisher that value their own content more than any consumer would.
The ones that I know that work well are sites that provide information that others cannot provide, not just what others do not currently provide. Your sites may very well be in that category, and in that case you probably should go for it.
By the way, if you are going to start charging for your content that was previously free, make sure that any archives in the wayback machine are cleared before you start your subscription model. You also better block the SEs from caching while you still let them crawl.
Good luck, and would you give us an update later on?
Thanks. It will probably be a few months before I can make a good evaluation.
By the way, if you are going to start charging for your content that was previously free, make sure that any archives in the wayback machine are cleared before you start your subscription model.
That's a good suggestion. I'm going to leave the existing content available as search engine bait. New subscribers will get the new content. I add exclusive content about 3 times per week.
FarmBoy
Harking on about online advertising rise is meaningless if not compared to Googles continued effort to increase publisher numbers with more and more content dumped into the internet.
Besides the premium publishers, adsense is Googles bottomfeeder program for all the wee markets they haven't yet choosen to invade. All mega companies do the same, Tesco etc etc.
NYT is old money and an old business and not what most adsense publishers are.
Subscription need an information monopoly and a neccessity/desire of your users to get that info.
The onld money publisher in our sector fails since four years but that's Wikipedia territory, they obviously have higher quality that WP and educated staff, but that's kinda unimportant these days. They even have now a page explaing people that it actually costs 500.000 Euros to do what they do. They also participate in crisis meetings about the future of journalism and so on.
There is probably another wave of get rich quick publishers on the horizon, so that we talk maybe 3 to 5 years, until they have all died off and then maybe adsense is getting a useful program.
So it's really a time of waiting now until the web 2.0 population has the new found, "I can publish too", out of their system ..
So my simple opinion is, as long as the number of internet sites keeps rising only Google will get richer, while our market place gets fuller and we will earn less if the money influx in increase advertising doesn't keep up with it.
There is obvioulsy variation around, this some will do better, some worse and who shouts the loudest wins.
Would be really interesting to plot number of websites vs increase of ad money, since we are unlikely to get the number of adsense publishers vs time from Google.
Congrats, any way to diversify away from Googles hobby sites outlet can only be a good business decision.
I was under the impression that Farmboy was switching from AdSense to a subscription model (not "diversifying," which would imply adding, not replacing, a revenue stream).
Harking on about online advertising rise is meaningless if not compared to Googles continued effort to increase publisher numbers with more and more content dumped into the internet.
AdSense is merely one form of advertising. The greatest growth in online advertising right now is in display advertising, so if you limit your advertising world view to CPC text ads, you're seeing only a small part of the landscape.
In a roundabout way, I'm applying that approach to a web site.
Maybe he does it to all his sites, then I have misunderstood. :)
AdSense is merely one form of advertising. The greatest growth in online advertising right now is in display advertising, so if you limit your advertising world view to CPC text ads, you're seeing only a small part of the landscape.
Any concrete numbers? Or is the usual dismissive one liner all there is. :) How is the display ad market, for example, exempt from more publishers cramming into the market space?
If there is indeed any hard info that ad market increase is higher than publisher increase then fine, until then I am not convinced.
Mentioning ad increase on its own is equivalent to mentioning increase in income without mentioning inflation, exchange rate without the Big Mac index.
About 0.37, roughly a third of the number of postings here.
1.) that they don't want to know how their money is spent,
2.) they are more likely to be technically uninterested and therefore less likely to post in a webmaster forum
3.)or are there not enough?
I guess it's a mixture of all these factors.
Even if points 1 and 2 account for the missing 2/3rds that would mean there is 1 adword customer per adsense publisher.
Then how many of those adword publishers want to actually be in the content network and not just in Gsearch, what is their median/mean expenditure in which market place?
I went into adsense after I read an article in the Economist, didn't track that enough.. : / Mea culpa
"The Economist where it is revealed that AdSense adds about 10-20% to Google’s profit margin, while the share of AdWords is a phenomenal 60%. (Note the Economist figures are of profit margins, not revenues.)" Friday, July 27, 2007
Then there are Headlines of "AdSense Makes Increasingly Less Sense for Google"
Now:
BusinessWeek:
"eMarketer put the display advertising number at $3.34 billion for 2006 and expected it to grow to $4.5 billion by 2010. Meanwhile, paid search advertising accounted for $6.76 billion of online ad spending in 2006 and was projected to grow to $10.3 billion by 2010."April 14, 2007
So we have a procentual predicted increase in display ads of 134% to "only" 4.4 billion and a search advertising increase of 152% to 10 billion.
So in clear text this means the increase is not near anywhere to be excited about and to prebook a yacht on the Bahamas.
I am still failing to see the big opportunity. We adsense publishers are not even search ads. Maybe you have other numbers. Please quote your sources.
So to make effectively more money you either need to increase traffic relative to what others dump into the net or future growth is actually extremely limited. Maybe if the sub $100s would clear the field, that would make a difference if they realise they are likely to stay there for a considerable time, if not for ever.
So farmboy is probably on the right track to get out or diversity, whatever of the two he is doing.
Any concrete numbers? Or is the usual dismissive one liner all there is. :) How is the display ad market, for example, exempt from more publishers cramming into the market space?
Try visiting other forums here, such as the Advertising Sales and Affiliate Programs forum, and you'll find concrete numbers. Spend some time outside Webmaster World, and you'll learn a lot, too.
As for the display-ad market and "more publishers cramming into the market space," the big difference between the AdSense world and the display-ad world is that the display-ad world is more selective. There are some low-end networks that sell cheap RON ads, but direct ad sales, rep firms, and vertical ad networks offer opportunities for publishers who can meet traffic minimums and (just as important) deliver qualified audiences. Google obviously knows that, and I think we'll see more segmentation within the AdSense network as time goes by (with site-targeted contextual ads, which are on the horizon, offering a glimpse of what's likely to be a widening gap between professional publishers--both large and small--and AdSense participants who deliver low-quality traffic).
I've decided to go back to the fee concept and leave some AdSense ads on select pages.
Good luck, mate, but do not hang your hopes high.
I did that once, and the result was utterly disappointing. I lost revenue and visitors. A classical lose-lose scenario.
Unless you are operating in a very demanded niche (e.g. unique adult content, with existing high traffic), I'd stay away from paid access. No wonder the NYT went from fee to free recently, and they had a valid business case before.
But YMMV.
Try visiting other forums here, such as the Advertising Sales and Affiliate Programs forum, and you'll find concrete numbers. Spend some time outside Webmaster World, and you'll learn a lot, too.
Why don't you quote, once, the information you base your conclusions on?
No soft info, dismissive one liners. Something concrete.
Spend some time outside Webmaster World, and you'll learn a lot, too.
As far as I can see, I was quoting from outside WWW. :)
You stated:
The greatest growth in online advertising right now is in display advertising,
BusinessWeek says:
"eMarketer put the display advertising number at $3.34 billion for 2006 and expected it to grow to $4.5 billion by 2010. Meanwhile, paid search advertising accounted for $6.76 billion of online ad spending in 2006 and was projected to grow to $10.3 billion by 2010."April 14, 2007
So where is that number you base your statement on?
[edited by: mattg3 at 7:34 pm (utc) on Oct. 9, 2007]
That is what you are referring to?
Graphic display advertising, such as banners, grew to account for 32% at $3.2 billion, compared with $2.4 billion in the year-earlier period.
so 41% in search ads 32% in display ads means 73% in non adsense ads.
The top 50 Web sites accounted for more than 90% of the revenue from online advertising spending in the first half of the year
So there is 1 billion for the rest of us in total?
Of which 32% in display ads = 320 million divided through how many publishers?
Still not exited .. but I keep an eye on it. ;)
I would use the model of free to get the basic info but paid membership has privileges
I think it depends on the topic and on who's likely to be paying the subscription fee:
- If it's a financial or business-to-business site that someone will visit frequently, the subscription model might work (especially if the user's employer is picking up the tab).
- If it's a site for people who are seeking information for a specific purpose over the short term (e.g., researching a topic, deciding what widget to buy, or planning a trip), the publisher will almost certainly do better with an advertising and/or affiliate revenue model.
