52 Bicycles

At BarCampBoston2 I attended a neat session on advertising revenue. Out of a number of interesting data points, I heard him make a great suggestion for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to monetize through advertising: build your own ads.

Here’s the plan: join an affiliate program (e.g. Amazon Associates plus API) and make your own ads that point to products. You make money on the sales that are actually driven, creating a short-term revenue opportunity.

And the transactions you drive create metrics that you can show to potential advertisers/sponsors as to what they will get for participating on your site. Your profits will drive advertiser acquisition, which lets you get out of the business of creating ads yourself, and move more resource into the site and managing advertiser relationships.

Or, if the ads you build for yourself are profitable enough, you have an alternative business model, even if advertisers are banging down your door!

This fixes the chicken-egg problem for advertisers, and shortens the path to profitability at the same time.

I think this model is particularly important for sites/services that fall out of the adwords mold - dynamic pages that are by their nature harder to index by the likes of adwords (which are otherwise the easy drag-and-drop approach, though very low revenue on average).  

I apologize for not recalling the name of the presenter, but if he or a fellow attendee lets me know, I will update.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Technology Business, Barcamp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Reddit This