Monetization Question
Hello, Hackers!
I have a directory Website where I list resources across 10 categories. Each resource links to the resource Website.
I'm thinking about selling the top two spots on each category page but I'm not sure what to charge. I'm not tracking click through to the actual sites yet but I do have Google Analytics setup. Each category gets around 2k pageviews per month.
Any advice on what to charge for a monthly fee for being in the top two results? Or, any other interesting monetization ideas?
Thanks!
- Jess
If it were me, I'd take some time to work out what value I'm providing to my users/customers first.
Once you know what useful problem you're solving for a subset of really engaged users, you can work out the best way to provide value to them (ie solve their problem) and also the best way to capture some of that value for yourself.
But you shouldn't need to ask random people on a forum --> once you really understand your users and the problem you're solving, the solution will seem obvious!
Good luck :)
Thanks, Louis. The clear value I'm providing to my users is having one place for an expert-curated directory of high-quality resources for the design community. I've gotten comments like "this has replaced all my bookmarks," which is great! The other value I offer is partnering with companies to offer discounts to email subscribers. Aside from that, I don't plan on building any other features into the site at the moment but do want to see if I can generate even a little revenue by the value created for visibility and driving traffic to external Websites (for the ones that charge for their products anyway).
The reason I'm asking people in a forum is that I don't have experience in this space yet and am looking to get some other opinions.
You could Research the average CPC on google ads for example to get a feeling what the value in your niche is. Also you might find some data on TAI / CPM for this niche
For a project of mine the average price per TAI is 15-20€
Do you know the click trough rates for your outgoing links?
Thanks, Patrick!
According to this article: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/02/29/google-adwords-industry-benchmarks
The average cost per click in AdWords across all industries is $2.69 for search and $0.63 for display. For technology specifically, it's $3.80 and $0.51 respectively.
I don't know the click-through rates for the outgoing links as I'm not tracking that yet but I'm working on getting it set up now. That's the most valuable metric.
And sorry, what's "TAI"?
TAI should be per "thousand ad impressions" - in germany its a quite Common metric called TKP (Tausend Kontakte Preis)
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Thanks, Russ! That's another good approach to consider. I may test out pricing by reaching out to a few people first as I'm also hesitant to display that I'm advertising/selling. To your point about collecting info for other ventures, yes that's a good one. It will be interesting to dive deeper into this when I've got proper link tracking set up. Thanks!