If you run a content site and your revenue is mostly banner advertising, you have probably watched your rates drift downwards for a couple of years now and wondered when it stops. I don’t think it does, at least not while ad networks keep making it easy to buy inventory by the ton at whatever price the market will bear.
The banner still pays some of the bills at the city guide, and I’m not about to pretend otherwise. But the parts of the business that actually excite me now are the ones that have nothing to do with impressions and CPMs.
A few that are working, or at least worth a serious look for any publisher:
- Sponsored and featured listings. If your value to a reader is helping them choose between businesses, then a business paying to stand out is not a grubby compromise; it’s the same product, sold to the other side. The trick is being obvious about what’s paid; readers forgive commercial content as long as they can see that’s what it is.
- Affiliate arrangements. Booking links, ticket links, anything where you send a ready-to-buy reader somewhere and take a cut. It suits a listings site far better than a banner does, because it rides on top of something the reader wanted to do anyway. The networks to look at are the likes of Affiliate Window and TradeDoubler.
- Email. Everyone underrates their own newsletter. A list of people who chose to hear from you every week is worth more per head than almost any traffic you buy, and you own it outright. Nobody can change an algorithm and take your list away.
- Events and lead generation. Harder work, but the margins are real. If your readers trust your recommendations, some of them will pay to be in a room, and some businesses will pay for a warm introduction to them.
The thread running through all of these is that they are worth more when your audience trusts you, and worth almost nothing when it doesn’t. A banner pays the same whether readers love you or tolerate you. Sponsored listings, affiliate revenue, an engaged email list; those only work if people believe you when you point at something. That is an uncomfortable incentive to sit with, because it means the commercial pressure to chase cheap traffic is directly at odds with the thing that makes the good money.
I’m writing this partly to get my own thinking straight, because I’m at a point of moving on to something new, and I’ve been taking stock of what I actually learned running a publisher’s marketing. The banner paid the bills, and I’m grateful for that, but it’s the other things on this list I’ll be paying attention to from here.
