Ask HN: How to make money as a digital publisher in 2017?

4 points by jasongrishkoff 9 years ago | 3 comments

Hello gang,

I've been running a website for 8 years. We still have great visits, but our eCPM has been dropping monthly for years now. Ads are also becoming increasingly bloated, leading to slower and slower load-times for the website.

Back in December I switched from "http" to "https", unaware that doing so would rule out a few of my ad networks who don't support https. As a result, our revenue dropped 80%.

Anyway... I don't know what to do at this point. For those curious, the site is www.indieshuffle.com -- and right now we're serving ~600,000 ad impressions a day with a ~20% fill at... roughly $0.10 eCPM. Would love to know if you have any tips or suggestions.

siquick 9 years ago |

How about some premium features for $x a month rather than relying on ads? Asking your most loyal users for $5 a month to hide all ads could get some decent traction. In my experience, users are willing to pay for products they use regularly, but a lot of sites are scared to ask for money.

If you're getting 600k ad impressions per day then your visitor numbers must be fairly high so even a marginal uptake of the premium features would probably beat that $0.1CPM

Look to Mixcloud for inspiration https://www.mixcloud.com/premium/

Also Promoted Posts (i.e. highlighted tracks) may work but you'd need to test if your user base is happy with this as I presume they value your independent voice.

skyisblue 9 years ago |

Some ideas to earn extra revenue for your site

- charge for featured listings that appear more prominently on your site. - place music related amazon and itune affiliate links - integrate outbrain or taboola

siquick 9 years ago | |

> integrate outbrain or taboola

As a potential user of your site, I really advise you not to fill your site with this clickbait crap.