Making money on mobile traffic

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Making money on mobile traffic

csdude55

10:04 am on Jan 26, 2016 (gmt 0)

Maybe it's just me, but mobile is KILLING my site! Mobile users don't post a fraction of what desktop users post, and they look at almost half the number of pages per session. Worse, I can only show 1 ad to a mobile session (versus 4 to a desktop session), and that ad is worth about 1/10th of what one of those desktop ads are worth.

Can you guys suggest better ways to actually make money on mobile traffic? I've tried a banner ad fixed at the bottom of the viewport, an interstitial banner after each post submission, and paid membership with exclusive features, but mobile revenue is still about 1/60th of desktop revenue (for 10 times the work).

When mobile was 10% of my traffic it was fine, but now it's more than 50%! Site traffic is higher than ever, but I'm making a fraction of what I made just 2 years ago.

csdude55

10:09 am on Jan 26, 2016 (gmt 0)

I should probably point out that my site isn't e-commerce, but data-driven. News, message boards, classifieds, that kind of thing, so we rely on ad impressions for revenue.

engine

10:12 am on Jan 26, 2016 (gmt 0)

It does depend upon the type of site content you've got, but later this year i'm trying a test with a subscription area. It's taking me longer to get it set up than i'd have imagined, so i'm hoping to get it running before the season picks up (this quarter is my quietest and traffic almost goes non-existent).

csdude55

10:54 am on Jan 26, 2016 (gmt 0)

In my case, I offered a "gold membership" for $1 /month that gave the users access to exclusive members-only features. I designed several features based on feedback from the regular users, and they're the ones that decided on the $1 rate.

I spent 6 months building features, with hundreds of people promising to sign on once it was complete.

It's now about a year later, and to date I've had a total of 7 people to actually sign up and pay. Grrrr! That was a ton of work for $7!

I hope your experience is better than mine :-)

engine

11:42 am on Jan 26, 2016 (gmt 0)

Oh, crikey!
$1 just seems very low, and I won't be looking at that level at all.

I haven't yet set my price point because i'm not quite ready.

Here's some research I did on price points. [neurosciencemarketing.com...]

csdude55

9:46 pm on Jan 26, 2016 (gmt 0)

In my case, I have about 120,000 unique visitors a week, so I figured that if I could get 1% then I would be happy.

Personally, I've never paid for any type of online service in my life (never paid to subscribe to a website, never paid for an app, never ever paid for #*$!, etc; and I've been a programmer since 1995) so I was skeptical, but other people said they've had success and the sites users were optimistic.

I have the same issue with mobile users that I have with people using ad blockers; they use up resources, but they don't contribute to the site financially. Both mobile and ad blockers are growing industry-wide so we HAVE to come up with an alternate way to make money; otherwise, the free internet as we know it is just going to blow away.

Hsteele

1:43 pm on Feb 8, 2016 (gmt 0)

Have you optimized your website according to Google requirements?