Getting paid to data ranch: Advertisements
February 4th, 2008So enough with the theory behind data ranching and user-generated content, how do folks go about making money from this type of operation? One of the most obvious ways that data ranches cash in is through selling advertisements.
There has been an explosion in online advertising in the last few years and it’s easy for anyone to put up a web site and start cashing in on pageviews. For data ranches that are more information-based (rather than community based) it’s fairly easy to generate click-through rates of around 1% or more. Community-based websites, on the other hand, typically see many of the same users day after day who are therefore more de-sensitized to ad content leading to much lower click-through rates. In a sad twist of irony sites with sub-par information and content actually see the highest click through rates.
Beyond the type of data ranch you manage (information or community based) and the quality of your information, the subject of your website will often dictate just how much revenue you can expect from advertisements. Just like a real ranch makes more money raising cattle than chickens, different subjects will net higher ad rates. The classic example of this is mesothelioma lawyers paying $50 per click for client leads while most websites are lucky to get 50 cents per click. I’ve seen this with my own sites with a site about camping seeing CPMs (revenue per thousand impressions) roughly twice those on my mountain biking website.
As an added bonus there is anecdotal evidence that placing ads from Google’s Adsense program will actually lead to a page being indexed in Google’s search engine much sooner than pages without those ads. I’m working on an unreleased website right now that is not linked anywhere online yet the google bot crawled it within days of domain registration and just shortly after placing the Google Adsense code on my pages.
Advertisements are certainly the first form of revenue any data rancher should consider in monetizing his or her website. Up next I’ll discuss some alternate methods for bringing your data to market and cashing in!
