Dropping Coin

Began rebuilding some of our core functions including bringing coding standards up and rethinking the product flow. Still looking for potential technical co-founders to help move this project along.

Began some outreach for potential customer feedback.

Created a new overall design for the site. Still need to update the landing page content.

Site functionality is getting there. Ready to move towards working on the API end of the site.

Thinking of creating a podcast of my journey from Solo Founder to launch.

Need to find a new technical co-founder.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll look at some of the different ways to monetize currently.

Advertising is one of the original ways of monetizing a website which involves playing an ad (or in some case, many ads) somewhere on your site. Generally speaking, web ads are sold as a Flat rate, CPM, or CPC.

Flat rate is where a website charges a fixed rate $1000/month to display the ad on their site. CPM is Cost per 1000 impressions, say $50 CPM or $0.05 per impression. CPC is cost per click, $1 every time someone clicks on the ad.

There are many negatives to using advertisements for monetization.

First, how many times do you ever click on an ad at a website? I rarely do knowingly. This means the CPC return would be low and the value the advertiser gets from the CPM is low as well. The idea that an advertiser returns with a low ROI on CPM diminishes over time, even if they're a great advertiser.

Flat Rate, is similar to sponsorships and different, but again if the ROI is low, then you may not be able to sustain it.

The net effect is that websites start adding more ads to make up for the lower CPM/CPC rates (and industry wide, the value of those has been declining). There are other reasons as well, the ever growing size of the web means a larger market place for ads.

And, of course, the big three: Google, Facebook, Instagram are were a majority of marketing dollars are spent leaving little for other areas.

Also, let's not overlook the worst of the worst ads: Taboola, Outbrain, etc. You may not know them by name, but you've certainly seen their ads on the web. They feature images with click-bait style headlines, "Swimsuit model by day, but by night..."

All of this starts to create a website that creates a bad user experience trying to navigate between ads and content, something a content producer wants to avoid.

When you consider bloggers, independent journalists, etc who are working hard to produce quality content for our consumption, how do we adequately support their work?

There are several methods: Advertisements, Sponsorships, Memberships, Patreon, Third Party Publishing (Medium), etc.

Each of these work and have their positives and negatives, but we think there is room for a more common sense approach that benefits both the publishers and their visitors.

The idea for Dropping Coin was first conceived back in 2017 but life got in the way. Now, I'm excited to begin the process of developing the site, which I believe is a better way for bloggers, independent journalists to monetize their content.

Got the landing page up, which, admittedly, doesn't have much information yet, hopefully once we start building out the API and website, will be able to add more info on what we're doing.