Thinking how to monetize my project with 20k MAU
My project is ARAM Zone https://aram.zone/ a stats website for the ARAM game mode of League of Legends. It has two main features:
- Check win rates of champions on ARAM, with detailed build options
- Check your personal stats on ARAM
Here's a complete overview of the project:
There are ~450 returning users every day, 1k DAU, 5k WAU, 20k MAU
No monetization yet.
I tried signing up for Google AdSense but they keep rejecting me for "screens without publisher-content" which I'm not sure what it means. I also looked at alternative ad providers but most of them are optimized for blog type of content.
My other idea is to add a "Pro" paid plan, but I'm not sure what I would add behind it. I was planning on making it remove ads, but there's no ads anyways. One idea is limiting the amount of personal stats you can see with the free version and allowing to see full history with the paid plan.
For traffic acquisition, I'm trying to improve SEO ranking but it's coming along slowly. My traffic is either direct, reddit, google and one other webpage that we share backlinks with. I'm quite active in the /r/ARAM subreddit where I found a lot of users. There's also an active ARAM community on Discord but I don't know how to engage with them naturally honestly, I'm better at reddit.
Also created Twitter and Instagram accounts but they don't bring much traffic at all. I don't put in much time into them either tbh.
Anyways, that's it! I'd love any type of feedback, specially around monetization and traffic acquisition which are the main things I'm thinking about but also anything else that you might think of!
I have a suggestion if you want to market affiliate gaming products that many users use for their gaming. Just place the manual link in a good location on your website and avoid Google ads because if approved, you may lose valuable traffic. Your site is already amazing and looks good, but ads make it more crowded and people tend to dislike them. You can also create a page for deals or offers, where you can add sections for gaming PCs, gaming laptops, and gaming keyboards. I have seen these types of pages work well, and you already have traffic from the USA and other countries.
I do have significant traffic from the US, so this sounds good, I've never done affiliate marketing before, is that like simply pasting Amazon or other ecommerce links?
Someone else also suggested reaching out to potential small advertisers to put a link to their product/website directly, which sounds similar to this. I hadn't explored this idea much, so thanks for bringing it to my attention, seems promising!
I suggest that you focus solely on Amazon, as it can generate a lot of revenue for you. If someone purchases a $1500 laptop, you will receive a commission of 2-7% (you can check the commission percentage now).
I did this three years ago when I tested electric scooters. I targeted high-priced products, and for each sale, I received a commission of $70-100/sale.
Sounds promising, will give it a try!
Thanks!!
I would spend a little bit of time looking at the kinds of video ads servers that already cater to serving ads in video games. You can probably hook up to a similar or the same ad servers and run video ads.
This might be a high development cost (your time) as opposed to a high marketing cost (your traffic).
And in looking at the games ads you might find some other monetization routes. Or a different idea altogether.
In addition to that, just to test the waters, I'd go find some fairly small advertisers (think around $100 to $1,000 budget) that would like to advertise. Literally other sites (competitors) or tangentially related sites. In contacting them and asking to sponsor a link/ ad on your home page for a month, you might find they have other monetization methods.
I would check out how Pat Walls grew Starter Story revenue via 1 single advertiser. Basically they set up that they'd have an exclusive advertiser: Klaviyo, and their cost would go up accordingly along with traffic. So they didn't lose out on increased traffic, it wasn't a race to increase traffic and increase rates. It was agreed upon some rate, either per traffic or per clicks.
Similar thing happened with TweetHunter, They would pay people/products per user that signed up, or per clicks. Instead of acquiring apps (which they also did) they were able to make back tons of cash from pure advertising rates, and just calculate it by either clicks or acquired users.
just a few things for you to think about.
Going after small advertisers is a good idea, I'd love to find some. I need to start reaching out to potential advertisers, cold-calling is not my strength, but this seems like the perfect moment to practice that skill :)
Will try this, thanks for the ideas!
A cold email is far far easier than most people make it out to be.
Once you find a company and a contact you have done 90% of the work.
Write a 3 sentance email. You dont need to pitch EVERYTHING in one email. Start a conversation. Be direct. Tell them what you know about them and about your visitors.
3 sentances can done in 5 minutes! A lot of research goes a long way too.
Will definitely give it a try, you got me excited :D
Usage quotas could be an interesting option... Do you have an idea of the distribution of requests across your users?
Ex) The top 1% make 200 requests per day while the average user makes 5?
It's effectively the paywall newspapers use after you've ready X free per month.
Some caution might be warranted - if they don't feel like your content is worth paying for, this might just piss them off vs actually getting them to pull out their wallets. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I hadn't thought of this but it's a good idea! I do indeed have 200-300 users that use the app all the time almost every day.
Like you said though, even if I got 10% of those to pay I would really piss off the other 90% which are my biggest users. Would be risky! I would need the number of very active users to grow a lot I think for the risk to be worth it, right now it would just be too few ones :(
Maybe a happy middle is having a pseudo rate limit where you get instantaneous response for the first N requests (where N is very generous) and then subsequent requests have a 5 second penalty before they're completed... 🤔
You could even phrase it something along the lines of "ARAM Zone is a labor of love and based on your usage, it looks like you're as big of a fan as we are. We'd love your support to continue development" or something else that highlights the reality that they're getting a lot of value from you and you're not getting much in exchange.
Can you look for direct ads from interested brands rather than go through an exchange?
That's a good idea, not sure which brands to target. Maybe I can go through popular streamers or content creators and see if they have any sponsors and reach out to them.
Thanks for the thought!
A few ways you can think of this:
Hey there!
Your ARAM Zone project has great potential. Building a community can boost engagement and monetization. Here's how:
Fostering a community can make users more likely to support your project. Good luck!