Monetizing Social Networks
Posted by: Frank under IndustryMonday May 5th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Monetizing social networks can be difficult. Users come there in order to interact with their friends, not in order to click on ads. A friend of mine has just started placing ads on Facebook and Google Adsense and is reporting a CTR of 0.1% for Facebook and 0.8% for Google Adsense. As a matter of fact, one of his ads ended up running through 15,000 impressions without a single click on Facebook. And he’s not alone with his experience.
While it’s a little early to tell (after all we’re just using a simple off-the shelf adsense account at the moment and we just started monetizing our site), it looks like we’re coming in well above the cited CTR.
Social networks may have their challenges, but when we came up with the idea for the SharedReviews site, we clearly had a focus on product reviews in mind in order to ensure commercial viability of our content. Since product reviews are an essential component of consumer research when deciding which product to buy it makes this type of content so much more valuable than your everyday generic social network.
I believe that Shared Reviews is on to something totally unique. as a contributer there, I’ve been totally amazed at how much I’ve learned about different products and how they work-or don’t. That personal voice has added a brand new dimension to reviewing. It is much more enjoyable and credible.
The keyed ads are highly relevant causing me to click through on more than one occasion. The reason I don’t do it more often is out of fear of causing an issue with Adsense.
Glad to see that Adsense is working for you frank.
I like your adsense integration alot. Pushing the ads above the fold is very important. I would probably change the 300×250 unit at the bottom “review bottom”. I would replace this by at 468×60 unit.
If you wanted to monetization to the next stage you can use their AdSense for search. This tool has worked out very well for me to get some extra revenue.
And one final tip, keep an eye on what ads you are getting by using the Ad Preview tool for IE. And block low quality sites, as they are more likely to only pay a few cents. You can block them in the “competitive Ad tool”.
Keep up the good work. !
All the best,
Paul - Black Dog
Paul, thank you for your comments. While we have started with Adsense we’re now working with a mixture of different monetization models. Since we’re passing most of the ads through our own adserver, we’re able to better monitor performance.
Also thank you for your suggestions.
/FM