Increase Your Website Revenue - 3 User Segments
According to the New York Times, Facebook makes about $0.20 per user in profit per month. Last month, they passed 1.44B active user and 1.25B active mobile users, which means they’re generating roughly $538M per month. That’s great if you have billions of users across digital platforms, but if you lack the explosive growth and reach that Facebook has achieved how else can websites grow revenue channels?
We believe there are three primary buckets of revenue that websites and publishers can use to build their business: advertisements, subscriptions and micropayments.
We are all familiar with the different kinds of advertisements that exist and the multitude of websites and companies that use them as a core revenue generator. From companies like Facebook, to small mom & pop bloggers, to large sized publishers, advertisements are certainly a crucial revenue channel.
But, for many websites, it is important to diversify revenue channels and move beyond an advertising only business. Having other revenue sources both increases the total revenue you are able to make, but also makes your business more stable as you are less dependent on one revenue path.
Because of this, many quality websites and publishers use subscriptions to drive a second source of revenue. As opposed to an advertising model that generates tiny amounts of revenue from a lot of casual users, subscriptions are set at a higher price point and allow a small group of engaged viewers pay higher prices on a regular monthly or yearly basis. This is a crucial way to increase the revenue of quality websites who have an engaged audience because it allows these sites to make much more than advertising alone can from that audience.
But a subscription paywall will only really be able to attract the most hardcore fans of a given site. What about viewers who are not quite ready to subscribe, but are more engaged than a casual user finding this site for the first time?
Yesterday, a third business model was discussed by Bradley Ross, CEO of CoinTent. In great detail, he explains “Why we need the ability to purchase individual articles and videos through micropayments.” The article summarizes the snowball effect of how increasing your individual micropayments will cause an increase in revenue, which in turn will help you deliver on the quality content your users demand.
We call this the win-win-win situation.
CoinTent has built an effective paywall that has the core mission of helping you provide the right price point for each segment of your audience to purchase pieces of content. Specifically, with micropayments alongside subscriptions you can drive substantially more paying customers than subscriptions alone can generate.
Website revenue models like micropayments and subscriptions are not right for all websites, but for the right publishing sites they can generate substantial incremental revenue on top of advertisements.
Let’s take a closer look at the different consumer behaviors below and how CoinTent is used for subscription and micropayment paywalls.
1) Increase Website Revenue through Advertisement from Casual Readers
The majority of your users are your casual visitors. Your casual visitors are users who infrequently arrive at your site and do not take any additional action like signing up, bookmarking, joining a newsletter, or subscribing. They generally visit your site through a link on social media or Google’s search results. Casual visitors are unlikely to pay for content and have the highest bounce out rate. Because this is the group of visitors that makes up the majority of your traffic, this is the primary group where you generate advertising revenue from.
2) Increase Website Revenue through Subscriptions from Hardcore Fans
Your second type of user can be called the ‘hardcore fans’ who have probably bookmarked your site or signed up for your newsletter to stay up to date on your latest information and content. This loyal group of brand advocates are most likely talking, sharing and even re-blogging your valuable content.
If you have a paid subscription offering, this is the group that is willing and eager to support you directly. They sign up for subscriptions to access all of your site’s content and come back multiple times a week to view the latest you have to offer. Without a paid subscription offering, you may be missing out on the opportunity to get significantly more revenue from this group of loyal supporters.
You can learn more about CoinTent’s subscription offering here.
3) Website’s Revenue through Micropayments from Curious Readers
As a digital wallet and subscription service, CoinTent specializes in paid content revenue optimization. In short, we help your content make more money. Our focus is to help websites and content publishers, who might already be profiting from ad revenue and subscription revenue, maximize return from insightful articles, useful videos, or pieces of content created.
So we’ve discussed how you generate revenue from your casual viewers and your hardcore fans who support you through subscriptions, but there’s also a group of curious readers in between them. This group is willing to pay for specific articles but is not yet ready to commit as a full subscriber. Our solution targets these in-between readers by allowing them to purchase individual articles with micropayments. Enabling individual content sale, allows you to engage more of your audience as payers and helps you improve the amount of revenue your site can make.
These curious readers may have visited your site once or twice a month but aren’t convinced that they should purchase a subscription offering. By allowing them to purchase individual articles through micropayments, you are letting them understand the value of your site without being forced to decide on an all-or-nothing subscription offering. This helps you both generate more revenue from those micropayers, but also keeps more of your viewers as engaged payers by reducing the bounce rate on your paywall.
At CoinTent we are focused on helping you drive more revenue on your site, and we have built an analytics suite to help you optimize and understand the revenue you generate from each of these user segments — but we’ll go into more detail on that in another post. For now, we hope this helps you to take a closer look at your own revenue streams and gives you some ideas for how website revenue models like subscriptions or micropayments could fit on your site. We’d love to hear your questions and comments below!
Original Post: 3 User Segments to increase your website revenue
