HACKER Q&A
📣 milanspeaks

I have a portal with 500k monthly users? How do I monetize it?


The traffic is increasing by almost 7-10% every month and monthly users have crossed 500k. In spite of such high traffic numbers, the revenue from Google Adsense is negligible. I want to get rid of Adsense and want to monetize it via some other means.

What are some possible ways through which I can monetize the site?

Link: http://www.bonobology.com/

  👤 aboutphilippe Accepted Answer ✓
Some quick thoughts:

Depending on the audience demographics, contact marketing team of top dating apps in your target countries (probably US and India) like Tinder, Badoo,etc.. and make custom deals to feature them. Negotiate a base monthly subscription + performance deal.

Have a look at https://advertise.buzzfeed.com, apply to their program pretending to be a large brand or new startup with series B/C funding and attend their sales call, they have the exact same business model.

Look online at Casper's strategy regarding SEO, they ended up acquiring the review website for mattresses that brought them seo traffic.

Ideally you could negotiate an exit strategy to one of the dating players if you have a good relationship with their SEO manager.

👤 ffumarola
How many pageviews are you doing per month and what is your Google Adsense RPM? Before throwing advertising out, wondering if the ads are working as effectively as they should.

In addition, agree with keiferski that ebooks could be a good path forward.

You could also do classes or "bootcamps" for skills training.

👤 Sevii
Look into selling dating related products. These can be information products or actual physical goods like makeup.

Beauty products

Fitness products (weight loss/ muscle, etc)

Dating advice products

You can either make your own or affiliate with people who already have products, basically selling access to your audience.

👤 keiferski
It seems pretty common to sell Ebooks and other products in this niche (relationships and social skills.) If you don't want to make your own products, contact popular authors in your industry and work out an affiliate deal with them.
👤 saradhi
From similarweb.com, https://imgur.com/Gd9FG8o, I see the page has over 80% bounce rate which might be the problem?