Is it worth monetizing a dedicated image gallery anymore?

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Is it worth monetizing a dedicated image gallery anymore?

CommandDork

2:22 pm on Jul 9, 2018 (gmt 0)

I'm seeing fewer and fewer "big" sites actually have a dedicated images gallery anymore - they're almost always keeping the user on the same page as the content (text/article) and relying on a plugin or JS to sort through photographs. Is it worth having a separate / dedicated gallery section these days and attempting to monetize it separately from the article content that's related to it?

I have one site that flows like so: Home Page >> List Page >> Detail Page >> Images Gallery >> Individual Image Page.

Over the last few years, revenue from the dedicated gallery / Individual Image pages has been shrinking, prompting me to reconsider my flow to the images. I'm believing that fewer clicks are better - visitors want to get to their content in "three clicks or less" is what I always say.

I know that everything changed when Google Image Search started taking visitors away from these sorts of pages (though there has been a slight change in how they poach this content now).

Dimitri

2:30 pm on Jul 9, 2018 (gmt 0)

Is it worth having a separate / dedicated gallery section these days and attempting to monetize it separately from the article content that's related to it?

No.

I had this too, but abandoned this model two years ago.

The reason being that, your pages for each image:
- have thin content (excepting if each image has its own description, information, and/or comments from visitors)
- with the brand safety of Adsense, it's better to have all visitors reaching a single page, with all your images, than each individual pages. With my understanding of the brand safety protection, it's better to have one page, with many visitors, than plenty of pages with few visits each.

CommandDork

2:40 pm on Jul 9, 2018 (gmt 0)

Ya, that makes sense. Thanks for the input!

tangor

8:58 pm on Jul 10, 2018 (gmt 0)

Hard to make a case for slapping ads on any thin content (and an image is about as thin as it gets!) these days. g has taken a critical view against thin since the barnyard days.

rocketsites

3:12 pm on Jul 13, 2018 (gmt 0)

We have this exact same model, and it still works pretty well, although I am planning on A-B testing a single page layout which lazy loads photos as the user scrolls. In between (say every 10th image) we will ajax load an ad via a header bidding solution (looking at Proper.io for this) or use auto refresh ads on a mobile swipe photo gallery (again Proper). I anticipate page views and ad impressions will plummet, but hoping that CPM goes up to compensate for the loss in impressions. The user experience would also be an improvement.

In order to avoid any potential thin content, all of the individual photo detail pages are noindex, nofollow. This also saves google bot from wasting time crawling thousands of individual photo pages and tells them to focus on the main listing pages. We used to canonical the photo detail pages back to the main "parent" page, but found that it affected social sharing (people couldn't share a specific photo detail page because FB, etc picks up the canonical tag and shares the parent page instead).

My site for reference:

Sale Detail Page:
[estatesales.org...]

Paged gallery (the 300x600 anchor ad on desktop does well here):
[estatesales.org...]

Individual Photo Page (large amounts of page views and ad impressions but relatively low CTR):
[estatesales.org...]

Hope this helps someone.