Audience monetization: How to monetize the audience of a website?

Audience monetization, that's what we are going to talk about in the article below! Advertising investments in the post-Covid era are expected to be even higher than in previous years.

Good news for those who want to monetize the audience of their websites or blogs and increase their monthly income. But with the updates announced by Google and the rise of Adblockers, content publishers must regularly adapt their strategy to make their websites profitable and adopt new online monetization levers.

The evolution and perspectives of the advertising market for the next 5 years

The advertising market continues to grow with a 5% increase in investments in 2020. Major industry leader. The digital sector now presents for the majority of ad spends of advertisers (51% in 2019 and 54% in 2020), with a forecasted growth of 11% for the coming year. 

Despite the problems caused by the advent of the all-programmatic approach – notably proven fraud, Brand-Safety issues for advertisers, lack of transparency in the media used to broadcast their advertisements – the budget allocated to digital advertising has not decreased in recent years.

However, the transformation of the online advertising sector that is now taking place, particularly with the successive announcements by browsers aimed to reduce or even eliminate the use of data linked to the behaviour and profiles of Internet users via the information collected from third-party cookies, will require an inexorable adaptation by all the players in the ecosystem.

This reshuffles the cards in the online advertising industry, leaving room for players who are more respectful of the privacy of Internet users and their choice (or refusal) to distribute information about them as tools for profiling and tracking advertising.

Google has revealed that it wants to work “to make the web more private” by wanting to get rid of third party cookies within 2 years (in line with the strategy of other browsers such as Safari or FireFox) and to restrict access to information contained in the user agent of the Internet user (including the name of the browser and its version, the name and version of the operating system used, or even keywords allowing websites to adjust their behavior)..

This ever-changing environment requires its players to adapt quickly and to set up an innovative monetization strategy that respects the new web standards on the browser side, but also on the user side so they can continue to expand. The effectiveness of digital advertising formats, such as banner ads, continues to decrease and more and more people are using Adblockers. Advertisers therefore need to move to new, less intrusive and 100% GDPR Compliant advertising formats to continue to effectively promote their products or services and reach potential customers.

What is audience monetization?

Monetization allows them to increase the value of their website, blog or mobile application audience by increasing monthly revenues through various monetization levers, including the sale of advertising space and third-party services, which are the most commonly used levers.

Audience monetisation allows content and media publishers to generate income from their web visitors. In other words, it is a question of using the traffic of one’s blog or website to make it a source of more or less high and more or less regular revenue. To do this, there are many solutions to help sites monetize their audience.

What are the strategies/solutions for audience monetisation?

Affiliation

Affiliate marketing is the digital monetization technique used by many bloggers and websites. In other words: it is a partnership between two parties:

  • the affiliate: the blogger who takes on the task of promoting a product or service
  • the affiliator the merchant who uses your services for promotion

Affiliate marketing is a win-win business partnership that allows publishers to monetise their audience and merchants to sell more products.

How does it work?

The affiliate will promote a product or a service on his site by means of links, banners, etc., which refer to the merchant site of the affiliator. It also allows the affiliator to increase his sales and get more traffic on his website.

The remuneration is based on the performance of the promotion with the affiliation, so it is possible to be remunerated in several ways:

  • CPC/cost per click You earn money as soon as someone clicks on the link to the affiliate’s website.
  • CPA/cost per action: You receive a fee for each purchase made by a visitor to your site.
  • CPM/cost per thousand: allows you to be paid for every 1000 displays of your site’s advertising banner

The display

Display is digital advertising; a display that fits naturally into the site and looks like the content produced. It is one of the most widely used and known audience monetisation techniques.

These are the various graphic advertising formats including banner ads, pop-ups, videos and animations. The display is a very classic concept in the world of virtual advertising.

This is what Google AdSense does by adapting the ads displayed according to the content published on the site. The more traffic you have, the more revenue you are likely to generate.

Netlinking

Netlinking is an SEO technique that consists of placing hypertext links called backlinks within your blog articles that point to other sites. 

It is a real strategic asset that allows to monetize a blog site and to improve the visibility and the positioning of your website on search engines.

The aim is to :

  • gain visibility in order to increase its popularity
  • generate sales and/or improve SEO when it comes to links.

Audience monetization via sponsored articles

This is a paid article or publication that you publish to gain visibility on a blog or social networks on behalf of advertisers in return for a fee.

As such, they can be written by the advertiser or by the blogger.

The advertiser contacts you through your blog and makes a proposal regarding the theme to be covered, the number of words, the price, the integration of backlinks…

Brands are interested in your niche and want to collaborate with you because they know you have influence. This is a non-intrusive monetisation technique.

Advertisers have a need:

  • to promote a product and rely on blogs that gather an audience that corresponds to their targets.
  • to generate traffic to their websites and build on the traffic already present on external blogs and sites.
  • improve the natural referencing of their own websites 

Audience monetization via web push notification

Web Push Notification is a clickable message sent to the mobile or the desktop of an Internet user who has previously consented to receive information via this channel. If you are looking to make your website or blog more profitable and move away from traditional display formats, it is now possible thanks to Web Push Notification and its non-intrusive advertising format.

Below are the advantages of the Web Push Notification format that can help you increase the monthly revenue of your site by adhering to the new advertising standards:

On the Internet side:

  • GDPR Compliant: the consent of the Internet user has been required beforehand,
  • a non-intrusive advertising format: the Internet user can unsubscribe at any time,
  • a “cookie-less” advertising format (no need to use a cookie to deliver a Web Push notification to the right Internet user).

On the performance side:

  • an eCPM estimated between 15 and 30€/mile (estimate for 1000 users over 1 month),
  • an AdblockFree solution (web-pushes don’t block each other, the web-push is displayed directly on the user’s device).
  • a non-intrusive advertising format: the Internet user can unsubscribe at any time.

So, if you are looking for a new source of income to earn money with your website or blog, discover and test our solution Notifadz. The first platform to monetize your audience via Web Push Notification.