What can you do to make money with mobile visits to your site?

A typical website these days gets an average of 30% of its visits from mobile devices. Here’s our website visit breakdown on our company website www.errnio.com. Combined with our tablet visits, we’re seeing approx. 28% of users from mobile devices.

The traffic reports this year also indicate we’re within the average. A recent article from Smart Insights, bringing together many reliable sources claims this to be the case — 27% of traffic is now mobile. Additional reports such as Kleiner Perkins’Internet Trends Report shows a global average of 25% of visits to sites coming from mobile.

So what can an average internet website owner, what we refer to as a ‘Publisher’ in our industry, expect to gain from this mobile portion of their traffic? How much money can a publisher gain from monetizing the site? The answer is fairly straight forward (don’t let anyone tell you differently). But we do need to separate this into a few categories. Here is our take on it. We see several option to monetize website coming into your site from a mobile browser such as Safari, Chrome, Android native browsers or others, regardless of the operating system platform used by the device (be it Android, iOS, Windows…).

  • Display Advertising
  • App discovery
  • Content Networks
  • Video Advertising
  • Alternative solutions

Display Advertising uses tried and true methods commonly used on regular web — displaying banners within the site, before the site loads, between pages on the site, opening new windows over the site, under the site, and some more techniques which your users probably like in varying degrees (from neutral consent to downright hatred). For this and more we have a lot to learn from the experts at research groups like Nielsen or Turn. Your average banner revenue on mobile today looks like this:

Source: Global Digital Audience Report, Turn

App discovery is another word for ad networks for mobile. The reason these exist is mainly because apps are more effectively distributed on mobile (duh!). They also bring a model that’s been very effective (VERY!) on web — install monetization. From an average app these days you can earn up to $3–5, and on an eCPM perspective they can compete very effectively with aggressive performance ad networks, which usually require very aggressive ad creative in order to convert. As a web publisher on mobile, expect to get to $1–2 USD eCPM for your traffic, provided you’re utilizing the right method, placing the app discovery banners/tools correctly on your site.



Content Networks are, sort of, a new concept. See those “recommended articles” at the end of news items on popular blogs and news portals? Those are basically units that determine the right articles to offer each user, effectively keeping clicking on to another piece of content. Networks like Gravity, Outbrain, and more, are making this a real viable product, which also gains high praise as a monetization tool? Why, because they place promoted articles from other sites. These articles relay on regular advertising to make they bid ROI effective, but their added value is that they convert to click much better at times. And so the tradeoff between CTR and CPC become good competition to regular display. Their added bonus is that they claim not to ‘cannibalize’ regular display units on your site. If you have content on your site, this could be a good channel of monetization to try out.

Video Advertising is big. It pays. A lot. But it’s intrusive. If you show users a video ad prior to entering your site, or prior to seeing a video, you can grab $5–10 USD CPM with the right content. It’s hard to give a proper range, but for simplicity sake — let’s say that’s what you can expect. Allow your advertiser auto play and you can guarantee yourself two things — money and negative feedback. Use this wisely. If you have a video site it’s obviously the right choice. Otherwise, apply gently and wait for the doctors notes.

Here’s the general problem with Video, Display, App and the likes: they are elements they intrude into your site, your content. On mobile the problem is aggravated due to lack of screen real estate, and they often directly interfere with the information the user has come to consume and move on. That’s why other creative solutions are popping in our industry to combat mobile. We’ve spoken elsewhere about the conversion and CTR issues on mobile. Our main issue is that an effective metric of engagement on mobile, CTR, is being dragged through the dirt, and is losing the battle for user attention. That’s why at errnio we are developing monetization tools that encourage an engagement from a native or natural user experience.


Solutions that offer the right, natural, effective click option to the user, are the way to go. They convert in ranges of 10–20% instead of 0.01–0.1%. We’re dead serious, alternative methods are that good. Try them out. We’re a bit biased here, and frankly we haven’t found too many (zero to be honest) solution similar to ours, so we’re just tell you about us. We utilize alternative spaces to interact with the users coming into your mobile website via the browser UX, offering tools like errnio Search, errnio Drop, errnio text and so on. Want to see it in action? Visit us at www.errnio.com