Monetising - TheWayoftheWeb

As one widget goes, another appears

November 24, 2011 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

The next time you visit TheWayoftheWeb, you may notice a slight change to the site. Following the decision by Google to shutter Google Friend Connect, that widget will have disappeared, along with the 82 lovely people who chose to support the site via that method.

Thankyou for your support Friend Connect people!

Obviously since the launch of Google+, and the focus that it now has within the company, it was fairly obvious that Friend Connect would no longer be supported (Incidentally, you have the choice of following me on Google+, or TheWayoftheWeb Google+ page). And I’ve already included the Google+ icon in the sidebar to hopefully allow the site to benefit from direct search and anything else Google decides to roll out.

The loss of Friend Connect doesn’t bug me as it did when Google killed the useful and effective social features of Google Reader – Friend Connect hasn’t really ever done very much since it launched in 2008. But it’s reinforced my perception of how Google views social connections, and how that differs from Facebook and Twitter. There doesn’t appear to be any information on how I could transfer or suggest to Friend Connect followers that they should migrate to Google+, or a confirmed date for when Friend Connect ends. And it feels as if Google still sees connections as just relationships between organised information nodes which will reform as needed.

Whereas I can’t imagine Facebook or Twitter would necessarily remove a social connection features without providing some way to switch – for instance, the move to allow subscriptions to the profile of an individual didn’t mean that they just deleted any Facebook page for an individual overnight. As much as you can deride Facebook for obscuring and messing with privacy, they do seem to understand that people take time to move, and some people will intend to do something and forget for a few days, or not get around to it. Whereas Google don’t seem fussed that I have no way to contact my former followers or friend connections should I not immediately figure out how to get them to move across. Or that I have no way of knowing whether some of them will want to follow everything I post on Google+, or would want a filtered circle of some kind?

So what’s being added to the sidebar?

Instead of Friend Connect, or reducing the sidebar to allow my site to load slightly more quickly, I’m conforming to blogging stereotypes and immediately filling the space with something else. But it’s something a little different, as I’ve finally got around to signing up for Flattr. It’s been around for some time as a micropayment system for bloggers and other projects, which allows you to ‘flattr’ a site with a small donation if you like what people do.

I don’t imagine most of you will donate, and that’s fine, but the option is there if you feel so inclined. And I’m interested to see what happens with it, as a potential way of rewarding content creation which has existed for a while but so far hasn’t necessarily grabbed mainstream traction in the same way as something like Kickstarter has done.

I’m also installing it in support of their plan to make November 29th, ‘Pay a Blogger Day‘. It’s slightly self-promotional, but also hopefully helps to raise the question of how bloggers and other content providers support themselves in the minds of more readers and subscribers.

Cash and blogging:

Definitely worthy of a follow-up post, but put simply, the mainstream media model of advertising-supported publishing doesn’t work for the majority of people to make a living by blogging. The amount of inventory available and the resulting low advertising rates requires hundreds of thousands or millions of readers to be your sole source of income (Although as you rise through the stages, you will probably find the available networks open up a bit and you do get a higher ad rate as a result).

Most bloggers also attempt to make money via affiliate links, but again, you need a decent amount of traffic, and you also need a decent conversion rate to make these worthwhile. And although that works in some areas, and with writers who are also natural salespeople, it isn’t going to work for everyone.

So then you come to using content as a driver for an actual business – selling information products, consultancy or whatever else you might think of. In my case, the money I make from this blog is tiny, but it’s vitally important in helping me secure consultancy and freelance work in content and digital marketing.

But again, not everyone wants to be a consultant or spend their time trying to hawk their latest eBook – it works for a certain number of bloggers, fails for a certain number, and some don’t want to go down that road.

So Flattr is the most sustained attempt at providing an alternative. A previous attempt was made by Scratchback, which closed a while ago, and which is actually deleting user accounts this month, in a strange coincidence.

So please do support the site via its new home on Google+ (Or the old ones on Twitter and Facebook), and do think about whether you might want to reward your favourite bloggers (I don’t necessarily have to be one of them!) in a more direct way via something like Flattr.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Monetisation, Monetising, Writing Tagged With: Blogging, flattr, making a living, monetisation, supporting bloggers, Writing

Twitter advertising rewards everyone except the user

April 21, 2010 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

Twitter unveiled ‘Promoted Tweets’ at their Chirp event, and the system is now live for some big brands. As part of their monetisation strategy, brands can now pay to have Twitter messages appear permanently at the top of search returns for terms. For instance, search for Starbucks on Twitter, and you get:

That’s seems fine to me, and the fact that it’s an advertising system based around search has brought many comparisons to Google’s search advertising.

Later on, Twitter plan to introduce relevant Promoted Tweets into user streams by targetting relevant keywords from recent messages, with those scoring high on ‘resonance’ sticking sticking around, and those low scoring tweets disapearing. And the initial CPM pricing will give way to a resonance-based price structure. Resonance will include reuse of a hashtag, clicks on an avatar, clicks on a shortened link, retweets, favourites, and the influence of a retweeter amongst other factors.

Here’s a handy video guide:

Again, keyword targetting isn’t new. And Digg has experimented with in-system advertising based on people liking the advertising content or not.

And third-party developers have the choice of displaying promoted tweets to get a share of the revenue, or disabling them in their client (perhaps to justify a paid download).

The only people that don’t get a share of the new revenue?

You.

Twitter users won’t have any way to make any revenue from Promoted Tweets appearing in their streams or searches. Which is different to existing in-stream advertising such as Magpie, or Ad.ly. The money from those third-parties is split between the platform and the sponsored Twitter user who publishes the sponsored message.

Not only are brands likely to go with Twitter’s own Promoted Tweets due to the publicity and bigger opportunity for relevant eyeballs in search and keyword targetting, but when users get hit by those adverts, they’re likely to be even less tolerant of additional sponsored messages sharing revenue with users themselves, which means the likes of Magpie and Ad.ly might run out of users willing to sell access to their Twitter stream.

That’s a shame for users in my opinion. While many might not agree with selling the chance for sponsored tweets, I’m of the opinion that it’s down to the creator of that content to decide how and why they might want to monetise it and to live with the consequences. I’ve certainly used Magpie beyond testing as it made me enough revenue to cover my hosting costs for my blogs without annoying many of my followers. And the ratio was about 1 sponsored tweet in a few hundred of my normal efforts.

The question is whether Twitter really is a social network in the Facebook vein, where all revenue goes to the platform and developers, or whether the fact it’s based so much on the content provided by users should make it more of a publishing platform like Blogger, WordPress, Posterous etc, which means it’s notable by not providing the Google Adsense for content creators to match the Twitter version of Adwords.

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Filed Under: Advertising, Monetising, twitter Tagged With: brands advertising on twitter, chirp, google adsense, google adwords, making money on Twitter, monetising content on Twitter, promoted tweets

Monetising your blogging rather than your microblogging

March 2, 2010 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Sponsored Post

Having spent some time running advertising with Twitter, I know how divisive it can be – and seeing as I know there’s a big group who split their time between microblogging and full-length blogging, I thought it was worthwhile accepting an offer for a sponsored post on the UK launch of blogging monetisation service Ebuzzing.

It’s fast and simple to register, and the main benefit is that you can achieve a good rate of reward for recommending or allowing services to advertise or pay for a post – but the choice of topics etc is entirely down to you. There’s no obligation to post anything you don’t agree with.

I’ve used Ebuzzing for a post on TheWayoftheWeb, and found it easy to use. There are three options to pick from – sponsored articles, videos served by a dedicated player, or videos and banners served in a syndicated player.

An Ebuzzing video campaign via the dedicated video player

All posts are “no follow” within articles, and full disclosure and advertiser names have to be displayed, meaning no room for any shenanigans, and no risk of search engine penalties. And over 600 brands have used the service to propose campaigns including Coca-Cola, MTV, MasterCard, Toyota, etc.

An Ebuzzing campaign via the syndicated videos and banners

So if you’d rather monetise your blog than your microblogging, then Ebuzzing is a simple and effective way to discover opportunities to do it for a decent reward, rather than struggling to optimise affiliate links for what might be small audiences, or having to go and attract direct advertising. And having seen an increasing amount of content providers beginning to use in-Twitter advertising, I’d hazard a guess that microblogging-related advertisers will be looking to place content via Ebuzzing in the future.

Register on ebuzzing.com

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Filed Under: Monetising Tagged With: Blogging, cash, earning, ebuzzing, microblogging, money, revenue

Twitter advertising will go official soon

March 1, 2010 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

Twitter advertising is already in existence thanks to third parties including Magpie and Ad.ly, but details of the official Twitter ad platform have emerged in an article by All Things D’s Peter Kafka.

Image by Stefan on Flickr, used under CC Licence.

The plans are apparently evolving and there are plenty of details to be worked out, suggesting that the launch date will be likely in the first half of 2010, rather than in a month as previous articles have predicted. It’s also likely to be designated a ‘test’ rather than the total solution to monetising Twitter.

The platform is very similar to a Google model:

Adverts will show up in related Twitter searches.
Adverts will use 140 characters and will be distributed via third-party applications, which can choose whether to display advertising and share in the revenue.
Twitter will work with ad agencies and buyers to seed the platform, but will move to a self-serve model.

It’s interesting that Twitter has waited so long to implement an advertising model which has been made so ubiquitous by Google – presumably they were waiting for a critical mass of users and search volume before the conversion percentage was likely to be worthwhile.

Conversion rates will be of immense interest, as the usage of Twitter search is likely to show big differences to a Google search – a higher proportion of Twitter searchers are likely to be solely interested in other users and conversation, and will be less likely to covert to purchasing around a search term.

It’s a good step in terms of avoiding advertising in general Twitter usage, and the fact third-party applications can share in revenue or turn down Twitter advertising is a good move, and could help third parties implement a freemium model to monetise themselves.

The 140 limit makes sense – but I suspect it will be challenged by advertisers who suddenly realise exactly how hard it can be to include enough information into 140 characters – remember how adverts tend to carry a brand name, strap-line, and a call to action?

The one thing it doesn’t do is allow Twitter users to monetise their own content – which is the route of third party ad platforms such as Ad.ly and Magpie. They work on the influencer strategy, meaning that I can display their advertising to my followers in exchange for money, and as far as I’m aware, Twitter doesn’t take any share of the proceeds.

I can’t wait to see the first case study from a brand which invests in both approaches at the same time – it could go some way to quantifying the difference between a search advertising route and a influential recommendation route with the same message on the same network.

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