Monetizing communities - A difficult task
For all the community based founders. What are some of your strategies for monetizing your platforms?
I know memberships and Ads are top 2. Any other creative non invasive ways to generate revenue that doesn't involve ruining your user experience?
I do sponsorships. As more of a hobby than anything else, I run a handful of hyper-niche communities/sites on the side.
Since these niches are neither very commercial (for example a specific sort of acoustic music, and 70s/80s B-movies) and are pretty low volume (my largest sites average 10,000 visitors/mo) ads aren’t really worth it and memberships would be a hard sell. So, instead we accept sponsorships.
The funny thing is, we’ve been approached by more people wanting to sponsor us, than actually reaching out ourselves. So sponsors are actively wanting to do this. I imagine that this could be easily duplicated in other niches as long as your site has authority within the space.
Good comment. But also, please stop downvoting other people's comments. Downvoting is meant as a means of policing spam and rude comments, not to eliminate the competition so your comments can make it to the top. Consider how others feel to log in and see the comments they took the time to craft have been downvoted.
Thanks!
Hi @csallen, thanks for this. I don't downvote to put mine on the top, I downvote if I disagree. As you can see, I upvoted other comments that I thought were helpful. I wasn't aware of this so I will no longer do this...I guess I was treating it more like Reddit downvotes. Sorry about that.
Hmm, thanks for the feedback. I'll probably replace the downvote icon at some point with a "report" button which is more explicit.
@csallen on lobste.rs, when you want to downvote, you have to provide a reason, choosing between spam, offtopic, troll,etc. but you have to provide one. It allows to educate the user by design. And you can detect incorrect downvotes.
How do you advertise that you are accepting sponsorships, and what does a sponsorship entail?
Funnily enough we don't really even advertise that we're accepting sponsorships. We just get requests. Some of this is because we kind of have a good reputation in both niches and there's not a lot of competing sites.
Sponsorships usually entail a monthly bit, where we'll write a non-salesy sponsored article/interview and post on social. We limit our community emails to one email a month, and make sure to feature them (along with something like an exclusive coupon code) in each of these.
Super interesting! Thanks!
Memberships are a hard sell. I also run a podcast and soon I'll be spinning a media blog. I'm very niche, so ads won't work. Partnerships is what I was thinking and offline events.
I would say targeted ads and email blasts are both good options. With targeted ads I mean you reach out to big brands in your niche and work with them to see how they could advertise throughout your forum.
You could setup a weekly/monthly email blast with a nice digest of topics and add some sponsored content to that as well. Since that can easily be automated you can also just beg for a few bucks in that mail with a funny line or two.
Most importantly - it's about building the community and you should avoid spammy ads. It's really about creating an immense amount of traffic (or really targeted traffic) if you want to make money in that area.
I think the IH community would have created the new Gold standard in Monetizing had @csallen not sold it to Stripe. However, this has now opened the doors to bigger brands possibly acquiring niche communities that fit into their sales pipelines. So that is always a new option.
Would love your take on this @csallen
I like native ads, like what Ben Tossell is doing with Makerpad, or Lynne Tye is doing with Key Values. Charge companies to provide something of value to the community.
@csallen thank you. Key values is killing it.
Info products are good to sell to a community. That is if you know what they want.
Courses also do well in communities where you can both collect info and do research for answers.
HI @AndrewKamphey, what do you mean by "info products". Are you referring to things like e-books, templates etc?
yes, ebooks, templates, guides, lists, checklists, white papers.
Info products could also take the form of newsletters. Or rather periodic emails.
Every community will be unique but there are some formats that easily translate and are sellable.
Also the idea of “sellable” might not just mean that the community purchases it. Could also mean that you can sell “advertising” in an info product, or create branded content for a partner.
A google sheet w/ a list of collections, may be sellable for $15 each, or taking the same sheet and using Sheet2Site, you could sell advertising on that site. or do both :). Provide 50% for free, sell ads, and then create a “download entire list” for a set fee.
What I personally like about info products is that they almost all start out as a google sheet and can go in any direction that is deemed necessary.
For example I’m starting to create mini email courses, but they are all videos and I’m thinking it might be better to put those into a website and charge $50 lifetime access to them... once there’s about 10 courses. Right now building the 2nd one.
Yeah that makes sense. My "info" product i'm working on is Q and A with experienced founders.
sponsored content,guest posting,....
But in general, I would recommend to build the audience, not the wallet. Facebook didn't implement ads from the begining, they did that when they had a large audience, and great retention.
In general, advertisers will chase you when they think that your community have enought interest for them
I agree with you however, as IH we don't have the lifeline to simply just focus on growth and monetize later. That's VC backed company speak. SO we have to bring this in as early as birth.
Well, I guess it depends of the niche. Because no need to have thousands of people in a community to make that active.
Just interesting posts/comments....
And retention is the key when the community is small because if people are very interesting, that will build interests for other people to join the community
Advertisers won't pay for something that it's not relevant for them. At least, not me. And we are doing tons of sponsored content...
Good luck
I agree with having an audience focus. I just keep monetizing at the back of my mind as I grow. The last thing you want is to not be able to maintain a booming community due to costs.
Some bigger maker communities (including MakerLog) are running on my app intravert.co now. Basically a super easy way to sell ad spaces and sponsorships through billboard-like banners. All native and fully style-able in your own app. You sell your own ad spaces (no network) and therefore also keep a much bigger piece of the advertiser budget.
@GritCom How big is the community?
Super new. Less than 1k
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