How To Monetise Free Content

[Clinton]

I'm a big believer of giving content away for free - all of the material on experienced-people.co.uk is free as is information on most other sites I own.

But free has its problems. There is a cost to producing quality material. For many businesses, giving too much away for free puts the business's very survival at risk. Take newspapers. Giving free access to all the latest news on their sites (usually) means lower sales for their printed offerings and lower ad revenue. Sure, newspapers show ads on their websites. In fact, the medium allows a greater number of ads, more targeted ads and ads that can be easily changed at the flick of a switch. However, all said and done, these online ads don't generate as much per reader as the printed ads do especially when the content is read in feeds or read offsite via syndication, apps and news aggregation sites. Rupert Murdoch, for one, is a big believer in the paid model. James Murdoch's position is that "Free online content cannot be monetised efficiently." They started putting up paid walls a couple of years ago at some of their properties. And it ain't doing too badly. The FT has a quarter of a million subscribers paying £250 per year!

However, that doesn't gel with online culture. Like it or hate it, people expect things free online. Subs may work for niches like the Financial Times and the Economist - and for local news - but it doesn't translate well into other niches which lack the immediacy advantage of news or the exclusivity of access to high level expertise.

The Vice President of media at Yahoo wrote an article in 2009, How To Make The Free Model Work, in which he discusses where free works best and how to make it work. He advises that while UGC has its advantages, it's the quality that a specialist adds that attracts users. He also emphasises how important it is to cooperate with other publishers to drive traffic even if that means a revenue share and explains that the publisher needs to be "laser focused" on monetising - understanding what advertisers want and responding to their needs.

That's all very well, but how much of it can be implemented by smaller publishers? Most rely on posting the content and simply sticking Adsense code on their sites. There isn't the economic justification for partnering with other publishers on a revenue share or hiring marketing staff to keep a close tab on advertiser requirements or responding to those changing needs.

How can small publishers increase monetising of their free content? Are there tools to personalise the delivery of targeted content that could justify charging advertisers a premium to reach the audience? Is it via using free tools to create automated reports on user behaviour? Is it via audience engagement? Can the small publisher create value by delivering content in the right context at the right time to each user? By building trust? By providing some content for free to tempt users into paying for premium? By re-purposing content into new forms, formats and platforms?

What has worked for you? How do you make your content work harder?

[Kay]

This is a great subject to talk about. Thanks for starting it. I really couldn't agree with you more on most of the points you've made. (That'll make a nice change.)

Free does have its problems. Yes, the attitude, "It's the Internet, so it must be free!" is very prevalent. And you even get anger and a lot of hostility from some people when they realise that they can't have everything for free. And, yes, there is a cost to the business of providing that free content. Often the cost is time. And time is a real cost. I could spend a day providing free content or I could spend a day earning money to pay my bills. And many website owners actually pay for writers to create the content which they then give away for free. And, yes, sticking AdSense onto it is the easiest way to try to monetise it.

We do charge for premium content and it works for us. I'm willing to share the info. However, I'll not do it on a public forum which can be spidered and picked up by anyone who can use a search engine. I'll see you in the VIP Lounge.

[Slowdive]

Good topic. As I have often said I do not do add sense, its partially a principle thing and partially a cost of cashing checks here. The off shoot of that is I always have to carefully consider how a site is eventually going to pay the bills.

My most successful ecom store was backed onto around 160 pages of niche information, if all my sites could replicate that places traffic I would be writing this from a beach in the tropics to be certain. The trick is balancing the hours it takes to create or the cost of buying top class content against a monetization plan. When doing a free site you need a rock solid plan to make it an earner.

Can you affiliate, if so to who?
Mailing list, how to get new signups and who is going to pay for putting themselves in front of those signups?
Do you have a product or access to a product you can monetize on site?
Does it serve other purposes, a free business blog that keeps you in touch with local business is a great example of a none earner that can still put bread on the table. Providing you have a local service to offer business beyond just the site.

The biggest part is planning, if one averages out the cost of an article to $50.00, I believe it costs me more if I write them. If you need 30 articles to be a decent resource, well you have laid out $1500. So you need X amount of advertisers, X amount of signups and preferably a method to syphon some of the traffic out to a money making project or site.

The other important factor is to encourage user interaction, its a free site you ultimately want to be doing as little as possible for it. So be that forums, guest writers or other content contribution. You do not want to end up doing all the work

My final tip is create a product, give it a price and then give it away. An E-book is the obvious answer, often too obvious but its a model that works well. If it has perceived value it will be placed on file sharing systems it will be placed on forums, it will link back to you in many cases. If you put a affiliate code into it wont make it into a lot of torrent services, so that is either good or bad depending on how you view things. Then once its getting out there, start updating the original on your site so people needing the latest version need to come through to you. Stick a $5 tag on it and then give it away to members who subscribe or perform a set of actions you want done, survey, sign-ups, tweet....what ever.

This works awesomely with a template or software that will require updates to function. In fact I suspect there would be money in putting out an awesome template that wont work after an update and then charging for version 3.1.1 as example. However you do it though, if you can create some reliance or reason to keep checking back in you will have created a traffic stream that is hungry and needs you. Once you have that making money is some what easier.

The final tip is think outside the box, if you provide a product from a location? Start thinking do people want to visit this location and how can I profit from that? If you provide information on the latest I7 chances are people want to over clock it, so how do I make money from that. If a page is getting a thousand unique a day, is it not time for a small webpage on the topic. A small page you can cram full of money makers without hurting your free sites pristine image and all

Just some thoughts.

[Kay]

The final tip is think outside the box, if you provide a product from a location? Start thinking do people want to visit this location and how can I profit from that? If you provide information on the latest I7 chances are people want to over clock it, so how do I make money from that. If a page is getting a thousand unique a day, is it not time for a small webpage on the topic. A small page you can cram full of money makers without hurting your free sites pristine image and all

Slowdive, I'm sure that this is probably great advice, but I'm sorry because I don't understand what you're saying. Could you please explain (perhaps in simpler terms) what you mean so the slower ones (like me) can understand it. Thanks!

[Slowdive]

Slowdive, I'm sure that this is probably great advice, but I'm sorry because I don't understand what you're saying. Could you please explain (perhaps in simpler terms) what you mean so the slower ones (like me) can understand it. Thanks!

I was probably not too clear, let me break it down a little.

Lets say I had a very popular article on the most splendid beaches around Namibia, this article was drawing a lot of visitors, comments and back-links. Clearly people are interested in the location and are either fascinated by the obscurity or doing research on potential vacation locations. I need to find a local travel agent to partner up with and begin offering people the chance to visit here. Even if that is only advertising revenue from local businesse. Even better if its a profit share or aff rate on full packages .
However the same is true of a website about massages, popular page on a certain type of massage how can I find a seller of massage products who is going to generate me the most profit. Well the most profit would be in reselling a local affordable product or at least if its a small start up its unique to my website.

More over I had a blog on collectables, I estimated that a percent of my sales were coming from the search XXXX search term. So I made a website xxxxterm.com that shot right to the top of the serps for its specific keywords and a few others and even though the site only draws in maybe 200 visitors a month. I estimate it has a 25% conversion rate. Of course that particular model has a high element of search engine reliance, but that's all right as I still have the original site on collectables with a better split of traffic.

The best thing about free content is that it allows you as the site owner to gather valuable data which is why its so important to know where people are going on a site. If I have a dog site and people click straight on the labradoodle, then spend 3-5 minutes on that page, perhaps they comment perhaps they do not. However the fact they went straight to X spent approximately the time to read the content is proof of concept they are interested in that topic.

[DaveMurphy]

I don't know if it's necessarily a good fit for here but my own forum brings in a few dollars from a Kachingle medallion. Users set up a kachingle subscription for $5 a month which then gets spread amongst sites they've chosen to sponsor in rough proportion to the visits they make to each site during the month. Still not quite sure about the rules on linking so I won't but a search should find it easily enough.

[crabfoot]

There are objectives in any organisation, which are not necessarily aimed at making profit. Clinton's primary objective for E-P was to create a place where the buying and selling of websites could be discussed freely, with a secondary objective that it should not cost him enormous sums to set up. Of course, there are now more and complex objectives arising from the progressive growth of the place, but the original philosophy is guiding the place.

Returning to Clinton's original theme, the newspapers, there is one example which has some similarities - the Guardian group. Mention the name, and titles like the Guardian and the Observer spring to mind - but those papers do not make a profit. The money which keeps them afloat comes from the hugely successful Auto Trader publications, which have content consisting almost entirely of user-generated paid adverts, and which have also benefitted from the growth of the internet.

Other publications in the same car-selling vein have been swept aside, or changed direction, and the non-profit newspapers survive to balance the views of the right wing papers.

But the question was how to make free content work to make money, harder than Adsense?

To some extent, you can use your content to sell physical objects. I have sold things on eBay by giving people details of how they have been used in projects, and I still have some things that will sell in that way.

People will pay a premium for some items if they are certain the item is exactly "right for purpose" - they WANT to buy everything for a project from one source, if it has been shown to work. The hassle is, of course, getting everything together to make a "saleable kit" in most cases.

[Clinton]

I don't know if it's necessarily a good fit for here but my own forum brings in a few dollars from a Kachingle medallion. Users set up a kachingle subscription for $5 a month which then gets spread amongst sites they've chosen to sponsor in rough proportion to the visits they make to each site during the month. Still not quite sure about the rules on linking so I won't but a search should find it easily enough.

Just for the record, we're very liberal with linking but we do come down hard on spammers. Mods are scarily good at telling the difference. Linking for the purpose of helping others - where you don't get any personal gain - is the type of linking we not only allow but we welcome.

I had a look at Kachingle. It seems like a great idea but I'm surprised it actually works.