You might have noticed a
lot of recent complaints about what’s known as “page view journalism.”
Thanks to the way online
advertising works, many online publishers push out tons of daily content, most
of it filler. Or it’s overtly controversial — not on its merits — but for the
sake of controversy (and page views).
Many attribute this
approach to greed. I attribute it to a marginal revenue model.
Online advertising has
grown by leaps and bounds since its collapse at the dot-com implosion. And yet
it’s still not the best way to monetise content and run an online business in
2015.
Here’s why:
1. You Need Lots of Traffic. Lots!
A general rule of thumb is
that you’ll need a million monthly page views before online advertising will
begin to pay off. You’ll need more in highly general niches (like celebrity),
and less in highly specialised ones where advertisers will pay a premium to
reach certain people (like mesothelioma).
Regardless, you need a
lot of traffic. And that’s not easy to get, considering you’ve got serious
competition for the topics where the traffic wants to go.
As you’ll see below, you
can make a lot more money from a lot less traffic with a content marketing
model that sells products or services. As an entrepreneur, you want to maximise
profits while minimising expended resources, which means advertising will be an
illogical choice in most cases.
I’m sure someone will tell
me in the comments that they’re making plenty of money from less traffic. In response,
I’d ask you to define “plenty.”
I’d rather focus on making
lots of money, rather than worrying about generating lots of traffic to make
less. But that’s me.
2. Advertising is Less Profitable
So, after 2 years, iwantmorebusiness.blogspot is right at the million-page-view per month point.
If we had an advertising model, we would have made about 20 times less
revenue last year in comparison to the model we have, which is selling mentoring
and training.
And if we added advertising
now, we’d be sending people away from our own products and services. Not going
to happen!
Even among truly high
traffic sites, advertising rarely stays the primary profit centre. Advertising
revenue can cover expenses and turn a profit if you have a ton of traffic, but
what next?
Take the tech blogging
world. Sites like TechCrunch and Mashable get ridiculous amounts of traffic
(well, TechCrunch used to). And they both got into
the conference business as fast as they could,
because that’s how you boost profits – by selling seats at an event, not with
more eyeballs on pages.
Tom Foremski spells out the
real peril of page view
journalism in
one paragraph:
"The dirty little secret of
journalism’s focus on page views is that the value of each page view is
decreasing, because the value of online advertising is decreasing. This means
it’s a strategy that will likely lead to failure. Media organizations need to
adopt a multi-revenue business model, or what I call a Heinz 57 model."
The thing is, you can start
your company by selling products, services, or events, and make more money
without needing all that traffic. Even if you hit mother lode traffic, you’ll
end up needing the Heinz 57 approach — so start thinking about it now.
3. People Don’t Love Advertising
I don’t know about you, but
what I love about business is making stuff people love. When people are excited
about the things you create and the service you provide, it’s a bigger rush
than the money.
Take Apple, for example.
People love Apple products.
They stand in line to spend hundreds or thousands of pounds on Apple stuff.
They wait by the front door for the new iPad to arrive.
People don’t love
advertising. At best, they tolerate it, and at worse, despise it.
When you have an
advertising model, you’re not selling people something they love. You’re
selling them to advertisers, which puts you in an adversarial position
to the audience. Plus, you’re polluting the experience of consuming the content
that attracted them to you in the first place.
Google is the greatest
advertising engine ever devised, because it’s the new Yellow Pages on steroids.
When in search mode, people are happy to see highly relevant advertising.
People still might not love
it, but at least they don’t hate it. The problem is, you’re not Google.
Why not make stuff people
love?
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