I'm not asking this to be argumentative, I am genuinely curious. How would one pay the bills to run a web site/forum like this? As I see it one can either charge a fee for access or sell ad space. Is there some other option I have missed?
Even if you were asking to be argumentative, it's nothing that you should be apologizing for.
First I have to understand what you mean with pay the bills to run a website.
Pay the bills as in your living expenses and some form of salary for yourself? Or the bills to keep the website up and running? You might also mean both.
Let me start by saying that there is no shortage of monetization ideas. You've already mentioned some but I'll expand on some ideas:
- You can sell adspace correct. But there are different ways to do this. The most used way is hooking the site up to Google Adsense. But another option is selling real ad space in the form of unblockable ads (guaranteed exposure). Usually this can be an ad in the header or the sidebar. You'd then partner with the advertiser on the design of the ad and the implementation. Depending on your platform you can make plenty money of doing this. A small side bar ad could easily cost an advertiser $300. And since the advertiser is getting guaranteed exposure it would be worth a great deal to them and a lot of advertisers are willing to spend big bucks on that.
Note: This kind of ad is not flash based or Adsense based. It's really in the sites body which means that it gets loaded up with the site no matter what.
- If you decide you offer enough value and you do want your readership to pay there are tools that can detect adblockers and block people who use them from using the site. By doing so you could force contribution by making them whitelist.
The next level to that is maybe a subscription model. If MR's core readership is 10,000 regular visitors per month. Imagine they payed just 1$ per month. That's $10,000 per month. Now you can't tell me by any means that the costs of running this site is near even half that.
You could add on top of that a per article fee of 0,99$ (or even lower) for people that don't want to subscribe because they don't visit everyday. But the beautiful thing is: since the cost of an article is as much as a subscription, they might as well avoid hassle and cost by just subscribing. Kinda like what Apple does with 16gb & 64gb. This even works with numbers as low as $0,10. Most people who consider themselves non regular visitors would still visit more than 10 times a month.
A lot of people don't have a good grasp of how much time they spent on the internet just browsing for stuff.
This is just the beginning of ideas. Some of them require investment in payment methods and site changes. But you gotta spend money to make money.
Without exaggerating I can honestly say that there is a plethora of ways to monetize a website.
There is absolutely no shortage of innovation in regards to monetization of websites.
The thing is a lot people to just hookup to Google Adsense and lean over because that's easy and doesn't require a lot of work. That's not a real monetization plan.
I would call that an open model: "You can contribute by letting ads load but we don't restrict access if you block."
When you have an open model, you offer your readership
choice you should respect whatever choice they make. And not guilt them into your preferred choice because their initial choice doesn't suit your purposes.
I would like to stress that I have absolutely no problem with any site asking for money or using some kind of monetization model.
I just despise the disgusting narrative that websites that quite frankly don't know what they're doing put out: "you're stealing from us by not letting us spam you with ads".
Take a page from Youtubers. They are brilliant with monetization. Do you think they just sit around waiting for likes/subscribers?
Some people don't have gmail accounts. Some people are just to lazy to click that like button. What if they just depended solely on that for their revenue?
They go to the advertisers, they tell them their stats and demographic and they say what's it worth to you? And a lot of advertisers just come to them asking them to do a review or whatever.
Like I said, there's no shortage of ideas.
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