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This is my 106th post, and I wanted to write a brief overview of online monetization as I see it, hence the title of the post, with its Blues Brothers overtones.
This short essay is not going to outline all the good and bad ways to make money, I've done that many times over and if anyone wanted that info, well I could write the 10,000 word document required, but another time.
I want to talk about value here. We all build sites and sell our space, and for years we've done it, often in ways that have come and gone, sometimes come back again, and most of them are the same ways that have existed since the (pre-google) days of webcrawler and altavista and lycos, before mosaic and netscape stopped being something (i presume) totally academic.
When a jpg had to be split into pieces so it loaded fast enough.
I see that people sell their adspace and traffic off cheaper and cheaper. The many many cpc networks I've seen lately, from kontera and adbrite to infolinks and basmatipeople (that's a joke that one, but it'll turn up) represent the very bottom end of the price of clicks - where they are bought and sold cheap as chips, by people who mix it all in together in one big bag o shoite, and it's rubbishy stuff that's the equivalent of supermarket brand vittals.
Then, far above them, in the middle ground, is google adsense - who rip off people on both sides of the fence and though totally negating the power a webmaster ought to have to determine what their page sells, they still manage to pay webmasters enough for the collective to seem happy (well, until recently, when google started to run out of steam, and that's going to catch up).
Affiliate networks are not so far above google, monetizing people by performance but still keeping people at a level considerably lower than the monetization they can gain from direct monetization of their traffic with no third party.
So what I'm saying, for those who prefer American English, is this:
Most low-grade affiliate networks and cpc networks are the cheapest rubbishest way to sell your traffic
Google is the second rubbishest
Affiliate Networks are passably fair, if you don't get suckered (sometimes individuals within the framework play fast and loose, but they don't last)
Direct sales of advertising opportunity (you can call it "sponsorship" if you want to make telesales easier for yourself) is the best method and lets you put the true value on it, if you have the means to assess that value - which all depends on your own initiative.
So to get my 5000 bucks to save the nun, my plan is to use affiliate networks to generate enough capital to create my own direct sales facility.
The 5000 is a metaphor. You make more than 5000 bucks a year with affiliate networks. It's the starting salary for a normal wellmade site. In my opinion. I think it's also the ceiling for google adsense most of the time - and people are a lot shorter than ceilings. IMO. i think that in the direct sales arena you could confidently target 50,000 a year, and make your own clientbase of a few 1000 big buyers who use up all your space all year round.
There you go. That's my nun story. All the best. I'm off again to do lots of dull data-related work to drive forward the evolution of my online presence. No doubt the trivial monetization questions will continue to flow through this forum long after this thread has sunk into readerlessness, but remember - when you sell your space - don't just GIVE IT AWAY? How do you think Google has so much dosh? And as for the plenty of "adsense alternatives" and the low-quality affiliate networks which serve less mainstream/highstreet needs... why do you think you can get rich out of a world of utter noninformation? There is not room for the vast majority of online money-makers and over the time the global economies reform in their new post-western way, 90% of online moneymakers will have to get other jobs and leave the remainibng 10% to it, because it's only 10% or less doing a proper job anyway. The rest are incompetent, greedy and usually monetized by google or those even more scummy networks.
And along the way we'll even chase the nazi party off a bridge, eh?
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