Jul 27, 2022

How To Monetize News Website Content: 5 Strategies

By monetizing news websites publishers open themselves up to a world of revenue growth. In this article, we break down five ways for publishers to monetize their news sites.

Launching a news website can be an exciting albeit stressful venture. The project takes hard work, tech savvy and an eye for selecting relevant content. Once a site is up, many are stuck with exactly how to monetize a news website. Knowing this information is crucial and can determine the success of a site.

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When learning how to monetize news websites, creators and publishers need to be aware of the multiple revenue streams they can use. Along with this, publishers need to be discerning in what revenue streams to use so they can maximize profit. The ones chosen will depend on site layout, specific target audience and overall engagement. Lastly, before diving in to how to monetize a news website, it is important for publishers to remember that this takes time. Most successful sites take around 18 months to start seeing revenue potential and gain.

5 Impactful Ways to Monetize a News Site

Many news sites today make the majority of their revenue by engaging in advertising best practices. Most tend to earn the most from different types of ad space throughout the website. Alongside banner ads, pop ups, and selling ad space, many sites make money through newer strategies. These include sponsorships, selling subscriptions, paywalls, and even live events.

Here are five in depth strategies to start monetizing a news site today.

1. Focus on Premium Content

Premium content is on the rise amongst news websites. By creating and posting premium content, sites can entice readers and drive traffic to their site. Without quality content, news sites will receive no web traffic. Without web traffic there is no monetization or revenue to collect. Premium content also allows sites to monetize the content itself.

The only way a news publisher will see revenue from premium content is if the premium content is highly unique. In other words, a news site’s content has to look special to a visitor and not just like any other ordinary news content found online.

2. Selling Ad Space

Selling ad space on a site largely encompasses the use of banner and popup ads. The process is relatively simple. The publisher determines where the ad placements will show on their site. Then, site owners will need to utilize a high ad demand source such as Google Adsense or Ad Exchange. Once the advertisement codes from these sites have been implemented, the banners and pop ups will automatically populate the news site.

The benefit of using a program like Google Adsense is that the publisher has control over what type of ads they can serve their audience. If the target audience is well established, then there should not be too much trouble in determining which ads will be the most successful on a site. The crucial element to make this work is to adequately collect data on an audience and match ads accordingly.

3. Using Pay Per Clicks

Pay per clicks, (PPC) is a basic advertising structure used by most websites out there. It is one of the most popular revenue methods employed by advertisers. Essentially, site owners get paid based on the amount of times a site visitor clicks on an advertisement.

The PPC system functions off keywords. Search engines push forward sponsored links when a specific keyword is entered into the system. The engine will serve the visitor the most relevant links to match their search. When a link or ad is clicked on, a small percentage of money is sent to the host, which is this case in the news publisher. With 65% of customers clicking on ads when purchasing, there is money to go around.

4. Affiliate Marketing

An alternative to PPC’s and selling ad space is using affiliate marketing. This type of marketing is commissioned based. Affiliate marketing involves earning a compensation or commission by promoting a company’s product or service. This takes its form on a news site via referral links. Essentially, a product will be linked to on a news site. If a customer clicks a specific link and makes a purchase, the affiliate marketer will receive a commission off the sale.

Publishers do need to be aware that this process can take a lot of time and can be difficult to begin. Reason being the amount of affiliate partnerships and the relevance of the products a news publisher would need to receive a decent revenue. To get started, news owners can look into programs like Amazon’s affiliate partnership.

5. Memberships & Paid Subscriptions

Display advertising and affiliate links might not produce the full spectrum of revenue a publisher would like to see from their news website. Due to this, selling subscriptions is another worthy addition. Selling subscriptions is a way that publishers can monetize content.

News sites like the New York Times have had great success with this. By having a site that includes premium and quality content, publishers are enticing readers to subscribe as the content is worth a few dollars each month. Publishers can either offer monthly or yearly subscriptions or implement paywalls so that content has to be paid to access.

Monetize Your News Website Now

When a newsite diversifies their revenue streams they open themselves up to exceed their earning potential. Knowing exactly how to monetize news websites is crucial to publisher and business success. The options above, should give news publishers a head start in monetizing their content. For more publishing trends and premium content information, head to Invisibly’s blog page to discover more.

Want to partner with Invisibly and start growing your readership and brand awareness of your content? Get the process started today.