Monetize your readers
Establishing a strong baseline for your site’s ability to drive revenue is critical. If you optimize your foundational revenue in a scalable way, you can leverage a variety of tools and strategies to maintain a strong revenue stream from the audience engagement you’ve already earned. Our team of experts and strategists can help you evaluate the factors below to decide the best path to optimizing your monetization.
Making a Case for Programmatic
Most hyperlocal publishers depend heavily on direct sales from advertisers within their communities. While this can be a strong revenue driver due to (usually) higher CPMs for established publishers, it can also fluctuate more than other revenue streams in terms of filling ad inventory, making it hard for organizations to maintain a stable revenue stream to support or expand day to day operations.
The Importance of Viewability
Viewability has become a major theme in this accelerator as many publishers still live and die by impression count alone. As technology has evolved, advertisers have become more aware of ways to measure ad performance and ROI of their ad spend. When it comes to optimizing programmatic revenue, viewability is key.
Sticky Ads
The best way to accomplish high viewability is to have ad units that are in persistent view as the user scrolls. This allows the ad unit to easily achieve the threshold of being counted as a viewable impression (at least one second) even for users who are fast scrollers or just skimming the content.
Other Revenue Strategies
Local news revenue does not need to be reliant on ads alone. Allowing donations from your community, and offering an obituary service can both be valuable sources of supplemental revenue.