CPM is Dead, Long live CPM!
Why Ads are not the future, especially for travel influencers.
Blogs, nowadays, are full of ads.
And justifyingly so, as ads have proven to be a great way for bloggers to earn revenue. CTR and CPM has helped so many bloggers pursue the life they always dreamed of.
But recent trends have shown that even though CPM is constantly going up, revenue isn’t. This is concerning since the biggest sources of organic traffic are also drying up in proportion.
As a solution, we talk about alternative and proven ways of building up a healthy flow of revenue that doesn’t hamper the user experience like most CPM ads. But before jumping to that part, it is imperative we know the reasons behind the decline in revenues and traffic for most blogs.
Traditional Revenue & Traffic sources
Bloggers rely upon a bunch of sources to give them traffic, and eventually convert it to revenue. Lately, the most potential ones have been struggling to perform. Here’s why:
SEO is dying
Yes, traditional SEO is dying. The most searched keywords are already being heavily consumed. Even the long tail keywords have not remained unique. Giant networks with high Domain Authority have gouged upon every possible keyword to fix their domain and sustain the top spot in Google searches.
It is a no brainer that to generate revenue you need to generate good traffic. Statistics have clearly shown the vast difference in the amount of traffic the first two pages of Google gets.
According to Moz in 2014, 71% of search traffic clicks are captured by the first page alone. This data has been reported to be as high as 92% in recent years and second page getting 6% of the remaining traffic. So, it’s a race to the first two pages on the search giant.
But with the ongoing SEO trends, competing for the top spot has become a herculean task for the bloggers. Neither do they have such huge databases nor they are left with any unique keywords to work with. And even with excellent content quality, acquiring traffic is next to impossible via traditional SEO practices.
Google Search Ads
Google runs its own Ad network called Google Ads on its search engine result pages. Since they are sponsored, they always grab the top spot in search results. So, even if a blog manages to be a part of the first page of Google, there is a high probability that it’ll get clouded by Ads. The chance of someone opening their blog reduces significantly because these search ads are highly targeted and proven to work.
See the above image, there is barely any space left for the organic results to show up. And it’s a battlefield for hundreds, if not thousands of sites to grab these spots.
Ad Networks
Seeing the state of SEO and search ads, it’s an obvious indication that ranking top on the search result is a mammoth task with no proven recipe. The irony is, getting organic traffic without ranking on the first page is equally challenging. So, bloggers turn to maximizing CPM advertising in pursuit of higher revenues. Ad networks, such as Google AdSense and Mediavine place ads on blogs and the blogger is paid by CPM. So, in order to get as many impressions as possible bloggers fill their blogs with Ads at the cost of bad user experience.
The bloggers here are solely at the mercy of the Ad networks as they have no say in what kind of ads would be shown on their blog. Although there is some control over choosing the genre of ads in AdSense, even then the actual ads can be completely out of sync with the original blog content at times.
But unfortunately, bloggers are forced to bargain their user’s experience with higher impressions to have a sustainable revenue.
Affiliates
Affiliate marketing is comparatively a better way to earn money. Promoting certain products or services to the readers and earning part of the profit made on each sale sounds like a good plan. But it has its own drawbacks. Generally, bloggers promote for only one affiliate network.
This means that how much you earn would depend upon how targeted the affiliate’s audience is. Even if a reader likes your blog and if they don’t like the affiliate you are promoting, they will never make a purchase from the link/widget.
So, being restricted to a single affiliate is a huge challenge and there is no effective work-around to overcome this.
Social Media Posts
Social media platforms are a great way for promoting your blog or brand. But there is no monetization on the platform. They might prove to be excellent platforms to reach a wider audience but are not helpful in earning a single penny.
YouTube is the only platform where bloggers can monetise their content. But this again is not always helpful as not all bloggers are vloggers or videographers.
Selling Merchandise/Products
Selling personal merchandise/product does not generally work for bloggers. Taking in account the psychology of the readers, even if they follow a blogger passionately, it is still highly unlikely that they would buy their personal merchandise.
Unless they become a brand, selling merchandise will not generate much revenue.
Rise of Ad Blockers
Reflecting on the above mentioned sources of revenue, it’s pretty much evident why blogs are full of Ads.
Apart from bloggers not being able to earn money, it has also negatively impacted the reader’s experience to a large extent. Plethora of Ads have become one of the primary reasons for increased bounce rate. Mostly, Ads are irrelevant to the content of the blog and hence the readers get annoyed and distracted. To avoid this distraction, they have started installing Ad Blockers.
This has put bloggers in a fix.
How Tripock is Solving the CPM Problem?
Since the traditional revenue sources have nothing going for them, the industry is in dire need of a second coming. Tripock has acknowledged this problem and tried to come up with solutions that work. Below are some of them using which bloggers can hope for a steady flow of income.
Being related to the travel industry, we predominantly talk about the methods that would help the travel influencers generate good revenue without having to ruin the experience for their followers.
Paid Subscriptions and Contextual Product Placement
Like many others, Tripock also believes that the contextual product placement is the key to maximize benefits for both the user and the influencer in the long run.
Andreessen Horowitz have talked about this trend in particular. They discuss how Chinese internet companies have adopted business models where they are more focused on generating revenue through subscription/non-intrusive ads. According to them, the revenue for Tencent has increased by 47% and only 16.8% of that revenue is from advertising.
The subscription option has proven to enhance the user experience for the Chinese audience by giving them the authority to select what they want to see or read.
And since, Ads are not the primary source of revenue, there is no pressure to stuff content with irrelevant Ads. Also, because they are in harmony with the content, the chance of a user clicking on them increases.
Affiliate Marketing Re-imagined
Tripock adopts the same business model for the travel industry. It provides travel influencers a platform where they don’t have to depend on Ads to generate revenue. They can rather do that through a better affiliate marketing strategy.
Influencers can create attractive & informative content to monetise it by providing affiliate links. They can also add the content as a widget to their own blog or website and generate revenue through existing traffic.
The above approach solves three key problems that has plagued bloggers (and readers) around the world:
- The ads are in perfect harmony with the content, thus the chance of a user clicking on them increases.
- Bloggers make money by promoting their own content instead of relying on often irrelevant Ads.
- The blog appears cleaner and is more engaging throughout the content as well as the affiliate widget.
The industry is moving towards a more personalized and interactive experience when it comes to monetization. And Tripock is leading that change to evolve how travel bloggers earn money by doing what they love. It is a first step towards a larger goal of letting travellers tell their stories the way they want to and readers having a fantastic experience of living it through their words.
