Hey IH, how do you monetize a completely free service?
Context: I run YouTube Realtime and recently also launched CountsLive expanding on the idea.
Across both sites, I get over 1.6M pageviews each month, but the ad revenue is next to nothing. Revenue wasn't a concern when I started this website since it was "just" a personal project (that was 5 years ago), but since then it has grown so much that it can't afford to not make any money.
I tried adding a BuyMeACoffee widget, it took 1.2M users (not PVs) to get my first $5, so clearly that isn't sustainable.
I have been visiting IH for a couple days now and this looks like a community I'd like to be a part of, so now I'm looking for insights and ideas from the community.
Congrats on the traffic numbers, Akshat. So who are these people coming to your site,and where are they coming from? Are these people simply fans of certain Youtubers like Pewdiepie? Or, are these people aspiring Youtubers themselves?
Here are some ideas
If a massive chunk are fans of a few specific YouTubers, you can probably sell merch on their behalf. Like a Pewdiepie t-shirt that you rev-share with him
If it is video creators, you can try affiliate links to video creating tools.
I was recently introduced to a site called Arc.io - that pays website hosts for bandwidth shared by their website visitors. I am not personally sure if it's viable, but sites like Imgflip use this, apparently.
Majority of the traffic is organic, some traffic via YouTube, Twitter etc and rest directly linked on other sites. YouTube Realtime is linked from major publications as well, so there's that.
I considered selling merch for specific YouTubers but I dropped it since I don't exactly own the rights to it, and reaching out to major YouTubers that have the audience to actually have such a thing is extremely hard and I failed last time I tried with a couple.
Arc.io looks interesting, I'll have to test it to seee how it impacts visitors though.
Your website is fully spammed with google ad Placements. I cant Imagine that you dont make some money yet
It's weird how someone else in this thread said that there aren't enough ads, and I replied by saying "I don't wanna overdo it" and then there's this comment. :)
It just seems like number of ads is very subjective.
I saw 2 ads, that's it. That's barely enough!
That's correct, there are 2 primary ads which you saw. There's another towards the end of the page, but less than 1% of people go that far.
I'm not sure why flowdee considers it "fully spammed."
Have you tried other ad networks? I think you're using plain adsense - but with that traffic level you could try Mediavine or if that doesn't work out Ezoic
I've applied to multiple, waiting for approval. I previously got invited to BSA's Premium programme but it didn't do any better than AdSense.
Put ad above the fold.
Sell "Become Influencer" course
Hey! I haven’t read all the comments, so I have no idea if this was said but reach out to companies in the consumer tech space and see if they’ll sponsor you.
You have millions of views! Some company will sponsor you for a mention in a video.
I have not read other comments.
But I think you should try some affiliate marketing banners there such as Fiverr (pays upto 100$ for every referral, normally 15$), Snappa for making quick youtube thumbnails (30% recurring revenue), and search the niche for more
Yes, that's one thing people have recommended and I'm looking at. Thanks for the recommendations on Fiverr and Snappa. Both sound good and I'll be trying them.
Why not use a freemium model like Hootsuite https://hootsuite.com/plans, where you can get a free plan with 3 social profiles , 30 scheduled messages, and only 1 user, and if you want more features you have to pay for it. Therefore in your case you could allow only 1 user and 1 tracker for free, and if a user needs more features pay for them.
That's exactly what I'm considering and what quite a few people here have suggested. I will likely have very generous free limit, maybe like 5-6 users free, unlimited on a premium tier.
Sounds good ! Good luck !
Hi Akshat,
These tools are both amazing.
Can't believe you're not making money.
Someone suggested adding printed gear, that could work. Printful is easy to use.
The other thing you could do is do affiliate links to related products (gamer gear for example,..)
Do you have info on engagement as well?
Most people spend over 4 minutes on the site, longest being couple days. There aren't a lot of stats that I'm tracking.
I suspect I'm not making a lot of money because the content isn't targeted that's all. I'll try affiliates.
Rather than trying to generate revenue you could look at just selling the site and get a nice lump of cash. https://indiemaker.co/ would be worth a shot
I've previously received offers to buy the websites, but I'm not really interested in doing that. They are quite valuable to me in non-monetary sense.
three cheers for the numbers :-) Need SEO tips from you. Did you consider locking premium features for paid users? counts.live looks more promising, I bet some marketing guys will sure buy it. I would consider this option. May be keeping "YouTube Realtime" free and keep the other one paid. Make an announcement on your page, see what your audience say.
Read https://www.indiehackers.com/product/influence-grid/i-sold-my-first-saas-for-mid-five-figures--MAjbSeHY8PvUxju0USy
The post has good tips.
Cheers!
I don't want to completely shut either of the website behind a paywall, because being open is their biggest advantage. I'm actually considering introducing a premium tier for CountsLive but I'm not able to figure out what kind of features should I offer at what price.
Sure, this is what I meant. Limiting the usage based price, the Freemium model
Yep, thanks for the advice. I'll spend some time to see what I can do here.
Normally ad revenue is $1-$5 per thousand impressions, so for 1.2M you should earn at least $1000/mo.
For sites like yours a potential revenue stream is oferring more in-depth stats for a subscription, or oferring a widget that you can add on your site, on some extra stuff you can pay for.
I do think the ad model is better/easier, try different ad platforms (Adsense, BuySellAds, direct banners, etc.) and see which one leads to highest revenue.
I can tell you that my CPM is way below $1 for some reason I can not understand, maybe targeting, I don't know. I will have to try other networks to know more.
Which countries are your users mainly from? That is one of the most important factors.
In order: US (15%), India (8%), UK (6%), Philippines (5%), Poland (5%), France (5%), etc
Yeah, I don't get it either.
Make a premium feature. Selling your own valuable product should easily net more then ads ever will.
Really cool and well-designed product! Nicely done.
What are your costs, and how are they distributed? Perhaps I can help cut them down.
In addition, it took me a while to even find a description of the product, and even longer to find the BuyMeACoffee link. Consider exposing it a bit more.
Don't be afraid to ask for money: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-just-hit-100k-yr-on-github-sponsors-how-i-did-it-878100de89
Thanks Mathy!
I work in optimization and scaling myself, so I have been able to optimize it massively and cut down the costs. You'd be surprised by how low it is.
The BMC widget is added to YouTube Realtime, you should immediately see it on the bottom right corner. I didn't add it to CountsLive.
I'm not afraid of asking for money, but really it's about for what.
In that case, I still think you should make it easier to find your link. It is quite hidden.
Alright, thanks for the advice! I'll make it significantly more prominent.
Crazy how many visitors you get! :D
I think the buy me a coffee is not really relevant for your audience.
Actually you have 2 sides where you can earn money from, the website visitors and the influencers that are listed.
Make money of influencers:
(i now find you are kind of already doing this, maybe to get even more traffic consider to do it for free (so you get even more traffic) but have a premium model: Show influencer on every page for an X amount per day)
Make money of visitors:
Build ability to boost/promote for youtubers their own channel for something like... 1$ a day. Track clicks and subscriber change, if results are too good - great, you can and should charge more.
On the front page of YT Realtime and on search results @ CountsLive
Second thought - convert your site's name/purpose to "influence finder" and... you will have a different product, that is already validated business model/idea.
That's exactly what I've been doing! You'll see a link on the sidebar of YouTube Realtime already, and an automated system for both the websites should go live in the next few days as well.
The "influence finder" app is also something I've previously brainstormed with a friend, and maybe we can work on it, although based on the discussions we had, it might take quite some time to build it. Additionally, there are quite a few roadblocks such as actually reaching out to the creators which I don't have a solution for at all. I think I need to give this idea more thought than I already have.
If you have a substantial amount of traffic from the US you should give exponential ads a try, they used to have great ecpms when i used them.
I checked out Exponential, and I see this clause "Highly targeted, relevant and regularly updated content for which the publisher is directly responsible" but most of the content on the website is user generated (one of the reasons why it's huge now). I don't think they'll let me in.
Amazing traffic! I've worked on monetizing Outlook Consumer before using data science with my co-founder. There it was around figuring out what's the most valuable thing for those ~200M users. Happy to help with this!
We're doing a free program to help people with <$5000 monthly revenue projects:
https://philippcannons.com/free-data-science-team-for-your-project/
Hey, that's awesome. I've shared my details on the website.
If I were you, with this big amount of traffic :
I would AB test offers (you can use google optimize or VWO) :
example :
Agency / Consulting , you propose your help to build something similar
Build a SAAS related product (plugin for youtube, etc..)
Merch : Youtube Passionate mug/blankets/pillows using POD (print on demand) like printful
That's actually a very good idea that I didn't think before. I previously used Optimize to test between different types of "donation" prompts, didn't give very good results but that does sound something that might really help. Thanks for the advice!
Find an advertiser that whose market overlaps with yours. Then make a personal deal with that advertiser for more money and promote them on the site. If you can analyze who your audience is and figure out what other products they might buy to go along with yours, you can promote those other products.
Thanks for the advice. I've been looking at something like this and try to sell ads directly, but that's giving me a lot of trouble to be honest. I've also been considering adding affiliate links to related products, what do you think about that? It's similar to promoting other products really.
I'm an affiliate marketer and I can say it does work. Counts live seems like a good fit. Stick a few affiliate ads below the fold for other services that creators will use (there are many), maybe also an Amazon ad for better video or audio equipment or books about the subject.
For the youtube site, it took me forever to figure out what it does. Move the first paragraph of your about page up to the top. Then see if there are any creator services you can sell. I'm sure there are some. Also, you might want to sell your own services. People might pay for reports on competitors and stuff, like a competitor dashboard, so they don't have to enter queries all the time. A realtime stats link of competitors might be a useful SaaS. You can track all social media accounts or as many as possible.
I will work on adding affiliate ads on the websites.
For the second part, tracking "competitors" or anyone in general is already available on CountsLive for free: https://counts.live/dashboard
I intended this to be a differentiating feature and it really is.
About providing stat reports, there's already SocialBlade that does it (and is basically considered the go-to for it), so I'm not sure how much of a value would another site provide for the same thing. Maybe I could offer more customized and personalized reports, that might work?
I looked at SocialBlade's pricing. Just do it better for less and charge for it.
Thanks! This I think is very much doable.
Look at this site....
https://www.webpagetest.org/lighthouse
Could you give me some more info? I'm not immediately sure what I should be looking at. It just gives me the lighthouse report of the website.
Is full of ads, sponsors probably. Not adsense...
The site is probably selling ad space
Ah yes, directly selling ad space. I've considered this, and I tried it, and it's extremely hard for me to do. I did not have much success with it, but I do plan on doing it soon with an ad agency involved.
If you can reach to them and avoid the middle step even better....
It's extremely hard and time consuming. I'd prefer an ad agency do it for me and take a cut of the revenue. They are likely going to not only be more professional but also have an existing network of advertisers.
Completely agree, I would do the same.
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Is explaining the story something that people outside of the maker culture be interested in?
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Most (>80%) of the people that come on the site are "fans" of other people or are creators themselves (mostly small). I honestly do not think that even 0.01% of the audience would be interested in a thing like that.
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Thanks for the advice though! I appreciate it!