On the contrary, monetization via niche networks like Classmates.com may have to compete with general social networks like Facebook.  And trading off less traffic from users to paid traffic of users is not an all-or-none proposition. 

The launch of Buzz also has given speculation as to how to monetize social conversations via Adsense or other options.

And Activision reportedly says social gaming monetization is speculative, and focuses on content (with reporting all-time highs in digital revenues, including downloads & subscription-based revenue).

In the not-so-great news for people favoring the content subscription model, Newsday reports 35 subscribers after launching a paywall-based website.  As someone who grew up reading Newsday every day, it seems they will have to tweak their formula a bit in the complicated online & mobile monetization ecosystem.

And OneRiot is making trending ads visible to all.

Facebook continues to grow and many offer ways that they can be a money-making machine.  Among those include social gaming, such as via the relatively new Facebook payments.  Online social gaming remains a viable money engine (the link includes a video of an interview with Gurbaksh Chahal of gWallet).

This is one in a series of Monetization Classics ™ – featuring information that should stand the test of time as examples of useful strategies, techniques and knowledge related to producing income.

The dating site PlentyOfFish.com (blog, Wikipedia page) has been widely noted as a site that shows how a single entrepreneur can find success in a competitive market.  It was started by Marcus Frind as a way to build a site while improving his programming skills, and timing was great as the Adsense text-ads monetization system was launched around the same time.

The founder wound up with a site earning millions per year in text ad revenue (later expanded to other monetization methods), and has inspired others to work to implement successful sites as solo or small business entrepreneurs.

The website  video below is an interview from 2007 with Marcus Frind, done by a media show based in Tampa, Florida (USA).

(The video is almost 10 minutes long)

A year before the interview taped above, this blog post highlighted the blueprint/business model for the PlentyOfFish site.  And while the interview above is years old, there are those as of now who believe the site is a web property that will continue to be successful.

For those running text ads on websites, there is the promise of using click to call as an additional revenue source (and the flip side is businesses can get people searching via mobile phones to call just at the moment they want to speak with someone).

Monetization of the Big(ger) Screen? And with the announcement of the iPad, monetizing it (along with iPhones and iPod Touches) may be easier for bloggers with services such as iSites combined with Admob.  A future post will give a list of services such as iSites that allow for easy mobile app creation.

Media : Monetizing new media continues to grow as old media struggles to monetize.

Online video monetization may be helping filmmakers who need to monetize their audiences, and sites such as Hulu are trying the pay option.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

(The video may start off with an advertisement.)

Is there a way to monetize video?  People think YouTube may have finally cracked the code, helped in part by the ever-lowering cost of hardware & bandwidth.  And others continue to try.

There is continued growth in the mobile monetizing potential, especially apps… even if some apps don’t immediately monetize.  Reaching people on this “third” screen (after TV & computer browsers) is being targeted.  Mobile gaming is a money-making area to watch (or participate in).

And online games are also generating more revenue in new ways, including enticing players to perform some monetizeable action in order to get virtual currency.

Social networks are having their most popular apps be some sort of game, making social games a hot target for revenue generation.

One social networking site is monetizing by getting their members to pay a fee to enter a contest.  And there are always helpful lists of ways to monetize a blog, for which there seems to be a pattern of starting with Adsense, and then covering ad sales (banners/video/etc), donations, selling e-products, affiliate marketing.  This monetization website (we share similar background with) is also covering a broader spectrum of how to address monetization in general and understand it as applied to entrepreneurial efforts online & offline.

Here are some definitions:

• The Wikipedia definition has some of the traditional definition, but also includes web-related aspects of “adapting non-revenue-generating assets into those that generate revenue”.
• The Free Dictionary defines monetization in traditional ways that are not related to the focus of this website, and refers to legal tender and conversion of government debt.
• From Investopedia is this definition of monetize: “To convert into money”, and discusses “monetizing website visitors”, which we’ll refine more further down.

Monetization, in a modern (including web-related) context, can be said to be the conversion of a virtual or mostly-virtual asset into money or its equivalent.  Examples of these types of assets are domain names, website traffic, website visitor names or email addresses, and reputation/buzz about a website/person/company/brand.  Examples of the equivalent of money would be the balance in an affiliate account, an online account such as PayPal, or coupons.

While bloggers and others with web pages believe they are monetizing their visitors or their traffic, they are more specifically monetizing aspects such as visitor’s clicks, visitor’s attention, and the conversion of interest into leads.

• Clicks: Most people can understand that a click can be tracked, and this tracking allows payment for the click.
• Attention: An example of monetizing attention (or assumed attention) is banner ads that are paid per impression.  Show 1,000 banner ads, get paid $10, which is one penny every time the banner is shown.  What is being monetized is the assumed attention of a website visitor to the display of the banner on the webpage.  We cannot measure actual attention, other than in a focus group or study, but the aggregate actions that result from of thousands or millions of impressions can be measured.  And, from measuring the outcome of the actions, the assumption of attention to the banner ads is made.
• Conversion: Whether through clicking on an ad, from entering an email address, from calling a telephone number, or from other outcomes, website owners and others can monetize the conversion from “not-a-lead” to “lead”.

This website will have more on monetization, and we’ll end here by saying the pricing factors of  monetization are a huge variable, and in many cases the confidence of the value offered may be the main reason why one website monetizes better than another.

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