How do you monetize your website?

[Simon 27]

How do you monetize your website? Do you use different revenue sources, or do you rely on just one? 

[begemotik.pro 0]

I monetize my site with banners and paid articles

[JennyorAlice 0]

You can also affiliate with different sites.  Places like Amazon offers an affiliate program where if people buy a product from their site through your then you get a percentage.  The customer doesn't pay you out of their pocket, places like Amazon pay you. 

[Smokey 1]

Account upgrades.  We have a pretty big following that focus on streaming & video content creation, so we offer paid featured slots to allow them to appear on the homepage, which tends to bring more eyes to their content it seems. 🙂 That's how we monetize for our hosting and any other fees we have. 🙂

[TopSilver 3]

I don't currently monetize my website but I plan to with Google adsense soon. I already have an approved account and had ads up at some point although I no longer have those ads and decided on not putting up ads yet but plan to again soon.

[Simon 27]

On 6/17/2021 at 10:31 AM, begemotik.pro said:

I monetize my site with banners and paid articles

Please do tell us more about those paid articles, are they paying you for placing links in specific articles or is it some other kind of deal you have going?

On 7/11/2021 at 7:28 PM, JennyorAlice said:

You can also affiliate with different sites.  Places like Amazon offers an affiliate program where if people buy a product from their site through your then you get a percentage.  The customer doesn't pay you out of their pocket, places like Amazon pay you. 

Doesn't affiliate links and such only work on larger websites? Do they work for small and medium sized websites as well? 

On 7/11/2021 at 8:08 PM, Smokey said:

Account upgrades.  We have a pretty big following that focus on streaming & video content creation, so we offer paid featured slots to allow them to appear on the homepage, which tends to bring more eyes to their content it seems. 🙂 That's how we monetize for our hosting and any other fees we have. 🙂

Now that is something I would like to be able to do in the future! Really, I'd say that is the way to go if you have a large and active community. I hope that I one day can offer value for my members, for example premium accounts which have access to extra features and whatnot, and something like that can sustain a community without having to rely on privacy intrusive ads. I'd love to hear more about it and how it's setup and working! What kind of subscription rate, payment options, and so on do you guys have?

On 7/12/2021 at 4:20 AM, TopSilver said:

I don't currently monetize my website but I plan to with Google adsense soon. I already have an approved account and had ads up at some point although I no longer have those ads and decided on not putting up ads yet but plan to again soon.

You can never go wrong with Google AdSense. 👍

[Ash 9]

We used to have AdSense but it was clear that a lot of our users were using an adblocker. I use an adblocker as well although I had disabled it for my forum so it unfair to ask people to do the same. Because of that, we scrapped the ads and went down the premium user groups route.

[Simon 27]

2 hours ago, Ash said:

we scrapped the ads and went down the premium user groups route.

Interesting! How is that working for you compared to regular ads? How much do you charge for premium? And what kind of benefits or special features does premium users get compared to regular users? 🙂

[Jason 4]

I monetized my website previously using Adsense but it didn't work so stopped using any service as of now. I may sell banner space in my forum but not sure.

[TopSilver 3]

1 hour ago, Jason said:

I monetized my website previously using Adsense but it didn't work so stopped using any service as of now. I may sell banner space in my forum but not sure.

Selling banner space on your forum can be a great way to see a return on revenue. A lot of times users can't make much on adsense but do that and people actually buy it. Especially if you have a good start on posts this can be a thing. But also memberships on your forum is one idea.

I was thinknig about having a premium usergroup and also a donator usergroup both with 2 different badges on my own forum at some point but have not yet decided if it would be a viable option as I still don't have many ideas for what the premium group could be. We would have private forums but I would need some type of idea for something that could be in a premium forum that would be valuable.

[Empire 4]

Several different ways, easiest is to have ads or affiliate products. Depends on how much traffic you get. Traffic is king. If you have no traffic then wasting time really if you think about it. I see most owners of there site do not fuss about Adsense or added ads to there site as they get nothing back, I mean it's like you doing it for them for free. If you have paid ads that people can order from you and or paid groups premium based, hard to get them to say Please buy 😛 

[GenXXanon 2]

I put a subscription model in place recently. This way no one gets used to free.

The plan is you start at the high number, then "level down" to the lower rates later. This will be decided by me based on participation.

I found a site that charges $99 USD with some other "lifetime" plans. It is a toxic site, but supposedly he has "6000" member requests waiting to be "approved". It's probably true, but still if he can do that then...

Now if I could just find some humans to join. 😉