If you have unique content, and I mean really unique, you should make people pay for it. I will provide examples of how you could do it!
Introduction
Nowadays content comes in many forms, and the number of options keeps expanding every day. Look at what we are doing here. I’m writing an article to be published on a huge international website. Others create videos for Youtube or TikTok, while others compose songs to put on iTunes and Spotify.
The reason for people/companies creating all of this content is usually to make money.
“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”
For all the big players in the content hosting space (Medium, YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, etc…) the monetization strategy is already in place. Some decide to charge their users for their content, while others make it “free” while serving ads.
And when all is said and done, that's really the only two general options you have for monetizing your content.
- Make a scheme to make people pay for it directly. This can be subscriptions, one-time payments, or other ways of getting money directly from the user. Typically the friction is pretty high for users with this option since payment details have to be submitted. You could more directly create a product out of your content and sell it as a product. This could be in the form of a course or an eBook. This kind of direct monetization only works with specific content.
- Serve ads or “sell” data from your users. This comes in many more flavors, and sometimes it can be hard to know exactly what you as a user are paying with when consuming content. But make no mistake. You are almost always paying with something.
So the big companies have an army of ad strategists and developers to ensure every user pays for their content.
But what if you're publishing your own content? Maybe you’re writing your own recipes blog, or have a niche website with video tutorials, or maybe you own a little (or big) news site.
Let’s imagine I owned a news site, with articles being published every day. How would I make my users pay for my content?
Paywall
I could decide to make my website completely guarded by a paywall. Paywalls can be purchased as a service or I could develop one myself.
This option shines the brightest if my brand is super strong and/or my content is really unique. If not, users will just find similar content elsewhere without paying for it. For smaller businesses (like me in this example), I properly would not choose this option. There could be use cases, where the added friction of adding a paywall will pay off.
Another sub-genre of paywalls is the idea of a soft paywall. Technically they are exactly the same as “hard” paywalls, but they apply some logic on top. This could for instance be, that content will be blocked only after a reader has read 3 articles. This is a good option if you want your users to get a preview of some of your content, before buying it.
Ads
I could decide to show ads on my website. This is typically what most newspaper sites decide to do, so there must be a reason behind that. And there is!
News is a fleeing-attention content type. Usually, people just click a link to an article on Facebook or visits their favorite news site, to get the latest update. If the friction to read an article is too big, the users will just visit someplace else. And this is really where ads shine. The upfront “cost” for the user is zero and it lets them consume content without spending money.
That sound cool, I think I want to give this a go!
The ad business is huge and therefore also a bit complicated. Depending on how many internal resources I have, the level of sophistication of the ad setup will differ. Let’s jump into the rabbit hole and see how we can persuade our users, to “pay” (by showing ads).
Initially, in my own test phase, I would most likely sign up for Google Adsense, which is by far the easiest place to start. Roughly speaking the process consists of signing up.
Inserting something that looks like this
<script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-1234567890123456" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<!-- Homepage Leaderboard -->
<ins class="adsbygoogle"
style="display:inline-block;width:728px;height:90px"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-1234567890123456"
data-ad-slot="1234567890"></ins>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
</script>Then you’re pretty much good to go!
Later you will realize that only adding AdSense as your ad “partner”, is equivalent to having a subscription with people paying 0,001$ for a month. If you don’t have a lot of traffic, you will never earn any real money doing this.
So if you want to move up the ad ladder, you might consider joining an ad network. This is basically a company that helps you with integration on your website and with getting higher-paying ads on your site.
If you have chosen to display ads to pay for your content you should keep in mind that each user is paying for your content with their attention. This means that each user that visits our site has a very concrete value to us.
Let’s do a little math
Let’s start by applying an initial example value of an average user to 2$ and say we have 1000 users a month. This means we assume each user will generate 2$ for us (highly unrealistic, but let’s just continue with the easy numbers) and therefore 2000$ will roll into our account each month.
If we show a video ad to our users, the average value will increase to 3$. Wow, that was cool. Now we earn 3000$.
If we increase the number of ads per page a bit, the average user will now generate 3,5$. Yes — 3,500$ in our account!
If we double the number of ads on the page, each user will now be worth 6,5$, but wait! Now there are so many ads on our site, that google adds a negative ranking to us, so only 500 people visit our site. Damn, that’s 3,250$
If we now place the ads a bit more strategically, meaning the users see our ads for longer and therefore click more frequently on the ads. This is attractive to advertisers, so they are willing to pay more. Our average user value is now 7,5$. Yay! = 3750$
With more data on the users (their interests, location, device, etc..), the more advertisers are willing to pay since they can target their ads better.
That’s great, then let's just send all our user's data to the advertisers and enjoy a way higher user value! $$$
Not so fast.
This is not really legal nor completely possible in the future. Websites are required to ask the user what kind of information they want to share. This happens through a CMP (which is that annoying cookie popup dialog all websites have).
Moreover, modern browsers are removing the option to use 3rd party cookies, which means we can’t send as much data on our users to the advertisers.
Wow, ok! Now I've done the strategic work of testing which ad placements work best, what number of ads are appropriate, and which kind of ads to show (video, display, native, etc.…).
Now I want to optimize the % of users allowing me to share some of their data via 3rd party cookies and other specific user and device data.
If 25% of my users reject sending some of their data to target advertisements, it means that the average value of those users is way lower than the people accepting to “sell” their data.
To reduce friction for your users while still getting them to allow access to some of their data, there are a few tricks we can apply.
Within the ad space, you can still monetize on the users, but rarely to a fraction of value as users allowing us to target some more quality ads to them. So how could we convince or persuade these users?
Suggestion 1 — Design nudging
This is simply the practice of designing your system in a way that makes it naturally easier for users to take a certain action that we want them to, without deceiving or lying to them.
The GDPR dictates certain design limitations, and the below picture might be in a grey area, but you get the point.
The idea is, that we should make it as easy as possible for the users to agree to “selling” their own data.
Another approach is to persuade the nay-sayers (the people clicking “no thanks” to your cookie popup) to change their minds. If we were super protective of our content, we would have put it behind a login. Since we didn’t, we should care a lot about what to show to the people that are actually not paying (having a lover value to us, than others) as much as fully “paying customers”.
Since they already rejected to click the “YES” on our CMP button, we can only gently try to change their minds.
Suggestion 2 — Blur content
Make images blurry for people saying no to selling their data. This could easily be done with the following snippet
let imgs = document.getElementsByTagName('img')
for (var i = 0; i < imgs.length; i++) {
imgs[i].style.filter = 'blur(8px)';
}and you get something looking like this
Other similar approaches could be made to other parts of the content.
Suggestion 3 — Improve your technical setup
There are ways, even though they are a bit more advanced, that could bring the value of your users up even though they haven’t allowed you to set any 3rd party cookies (selling your data).
Through some hoops and in collaboration with your ad network, it is possible to enrich the data you send to the advertisers of cookieless demand.
This area will grow a lot in the near future, as 3rd party cookies are soon a legacy.
/Get paid!
