Making money from the web - in fun ways. Possible?

Disclaimer: I in no way claim to be an expert in the following matters, this is merely a thought/discussion piece going over my own experience and research ;-)

Having a job that involves me doing a lot of research into advertising and monetising products, I have taken quite an interest to it. I spend a lot of time online, and as a result I have take an interest in playing around with the potential ways to make money doing this. As far as I can see there are several aspects that need to be addressed in order to have a chance here. Subject, Spreading the word, monetising and retention.

I spend a lot of time making let's plays and maintaining Blogs. I do these primarily because I enjoy them, but the amount of time I spend on them can be quite vast. To this end I have been trying to figure out how I can get this to work in my favour so that I can see some monetary return, as much of them require regular scheduling and content to be produced and is not too far off being a job.

So, lets take the Blogs to start with. Without a good way to spread the word, you need to make sure that the content you are providing is of interest to potential user bases, and is well worded so that users can find it. This is still something I am working with and intend to post about later, but my understanding is that the title, tags and content will all be parsed with search engines and the more it can find to use to match search keywords, the more chance there is of your blog being randomly stumbled upon. Apart from this, share your blog where you can. Find groups on facebook, forums, twitter #tags - everywhere there is potential readers and hope you made a good post ^.^

Monetisation for blogs is a bit restricted - there is Google Ad Sense adverts that most bloggers (even me) have around their page, but the CTR (Click Through Rate) for these is atrocious, although the monetary returns is pretty good per click. An issue that can arise here is many users 'abuse' the system by clicking adverts repeatedly or tying in with their friends for a click exchange system. Analytics from Google is designed to identify these behaviours and your account will get blocked doing this, so if you put up ads, be careful, but also don't expect much return unless you have attained a large viewer base and number of views per day. I am not well versed in other methods, but I will update this with any other methods I come across.

Blog retention. Retention is basically the ability to hold onto your readers, and having them return. In order to do this you need to post quality content, and post it regularly. This could be daily, weekly, whatever you intend to do, but if you make a habit of posting at certain intervals, your users will know when to look for it. Good examples of blogs that do this are Wow Insider - there are multiple articles posted daily, from numerous guest posters. This means that if you have them on RSS feed, you always have something new to read and can return again and again to indulge.

Retention example (Warning, confusing maths ahead!) of a YouTube channel: If you produce some good videos and get on average a 5% conversion rate, with 200 views a day then you are getting 10 new subscribers a day. After 10 days, this is 100 subscribers, yes? Well, there is also subscriber drop off. Retention rates dictate how well they are kept around. If you have a weekly retention rate of 95% from that point, then after 1 week you would in theory have: 95 of your original subscribers, plus another 70 new subscribers, so 163 with dropoff of those subscribers over the time period. Give it another 10 weeks (70 days, easy maths) then you will have gained another 700 subscribers - and lost (5x7 = 35) 35 of those, giving a total after those 11 weeks plus ten days: 665 + 163 = 798 subscribers. Sadly this is not as reliable a calculation as it sounds. Only so many people will be interested in your product and the more you have subscribe, the smaller the pool of potential subscribers there are - but very good content makes for a larger potential subscriber pool. I hope that is all clear, cos it did not type like it did...

Moving onto YouTube... YouTube is similar to blogs in terms of getting the word out, generating money and retaining viewers. Some YouTubers are able to put a video up that gets a huge number of hits, often because it is cure or humerous. If the adverts shown on the video are monetised this can bring in quite a lot of money. In my experience the click through ratio is about 5%, with each view that counts giving a couple of pennies to the poster of the video. On videos with that many hits, that is a LOT of money (as in thousands of £/$'s) but I think that there are diminishing returns on a video. For example, my first minecraft lets play which currently has just over 4,500 views - was returning about 50p/day from ad revenue with about 200 viewers a day. Now I am lucky to see 5p/a day from it.

If you wish to get subscribers to your videos - you need to make them interesting, and post frequently! I currently have just over 100 subscribers so I am no expert here. I attribute this partly down to them not being great videos (It is me playing a game and yacking away, and Im not as charismatic as many of the successful let's players.), and that I have not tried to 'get the word out'. Many you tubers will send messages to other you tubers, or post video responses to popular videos in the hopes that someone will click on their video and view. There is no doubt that this works to an extent, but I feel awkward doing such things. (Maybe I should, since to maintain the Let's plays I will probably need to start increasing viewer numbers to increase the odds of ad-clicks. To my knowledge all Google ad's and YouTube video ad's are safe and screened (Especially true of YouTube ad's as the videos can only be put on YouTube by a select few ad providers that need to go through a rigorous registration and screening process with YouTube.) I personally, am more than happy to follow links or videos that interest me knowing that I am helping the content creator out whilst doing what the ad;s are designed to do - but one needs to be careful not to be abusing this feature or they may get the content creators ad-sense account banned!).

Ok, I am rambling... but to summarize, I think in order to be successful at getting people to see the content you have created and to make money from it you need to have a plan that gets the word out, methods for monetization and try to make your submissions high quality, and frequent so that you can retain viewers whilst attracting more.

One final tip: If you want to get big numbers then take advantage of surges of potential viewers. Create videos or blogs that are on the ball and up to date. 50 Shades of Grey suddenly become a huge topic of conversation? (be it good or bad) - then any content that addressees some aspect of it has a huge potential viewer base (fans and haters alike, depending on the content). A good example from my experience would be my let's play videos on Minecraft. For the first month I was producing low quality let's plays as I was not used to the video recording, or the commentary. After this month of practise, I had about 30 views on my video with the highest hit count... Minecraft version 1.3.1 was released, so the day it was released I started a lets play. I had 1000 hits in the space of 2 days. I got a surge of subscribers and many of them are frequent viewers even now, a month down the line. Their feedback is what inspires me to keep producing videos as naturally my own wanes a bit over time - but a little community is starting to form and it feels great :-)