Monetizing Your Site

Take a look around the internet these days. Check your mail, your facebook page, maybe search for some stuff on Google… before you know it you’ve sat through roughly 20 minutes of advertising in as many minutes of browsing. More and more, the trend is to make websites turn a profit by monetizing sites through paid advertising rather than through paid memberships. Content providers offer a seemingly free service in favor for paid advertisement space in their own content network.

YouTube, Pandora, and Hulu are also prime examples of what I’m talking about. They intersperse paid advertisements throughout the content they display and users often sit through 5 minutes of paid advertisements for each hour they spend on the website. Monetizing a site in favor of charging membership fees is a great way to allow your website to grow organically through word of mouth. People are much more prone to take advantage of a free service which allows them to try before they buy.

One way of monetizing your website is by displaying paid banner advertisements and text ads through Google’s Adsense program. What Adsense allows you to do is insert a few lines of code into your website that will display ads from their network on your website. Your website and countless others are used as part of Google’s content network for displaying ads for people who pay to advertise on their network. The more clicks your websites advertising space generates, the more money you make. It’s that simple.