Total Monetization Could Mean Giving Readers Choice

With traffic to publishers dropping, more are thinking about maximizing the revenue they generate on those that hit their page. But to do this well, publishers will need to do more than simply launch a paywall or begin doing affiliate marketing. Total monetization will become an operational jig saw where operators try to piece things together.

Over the summer, I wrote about how important it is to maximize the LTV of your readers. In this context, I explored the concept of a revenue server. The idea was that operators would be able to promote the right offer to the right reader based on their behavior. I wrote:

Let’s use the example about lead gen vs. ads. Which should run? If you have good data about your audience, your revenue server would be able to deliver the lead generation offer when the right user hits the page. For example, if the lead gen is all about taxes and the user who hits the page has nothing to do with tax, showing lead gen is a waste. Monetize them with ads.

You can also do it behaviorally. If the user has engaged with an ad in the recent past about tax, show them a lead gen offer about tax. Did they engage with a lead gen offering very recently? Don’t show it again.

I’ve thought a lot about the revenue server and I am increasingly convinced that a customer data platform sits at the middle of all of this. The behavioral tracking coupled with a good ad server can make a world of difference when it comes to showing the right offer to the right reader.

But I argue total monetization goes even farther. There’s an argument that we should be blending business models to ensure we are maximizing revenue. Gone are the days where we can be precious about business models. Let me give you a few examples.

In August, PressGazette reported that Sun, Mail, Mirror, Express and Independent had rolled out “consent or pay” walls. This blended advertising and subscriptions in a smart way. The idea was simple. In exchange for allowing cookie-based targeting and a plethora of ads, a reader could access all the content on these sites. If the reader didn’t want that, they could pay. Express, for example, was charging £1.99 if you opted not to consent.

There are other ways to implement it.

There’s a company called True[X], which gave users the ability to see a dramatically reduced advertising load so long as they interacted with an ad. The idea was simple: advertisers were concerned that people were tuning out when the ads came on, so if there was a way to prove engagement, they’d pay more. While this primarily works in streaming today, it could also work on our websites.

Imagine a user comes to a site and starts reading the story. A popup can appear that says, “Access to this content is $10 a month or spend 30 seconds learning more about our sponsor.” In that 30 seconds, there might be a video ad or it could simply be a short article about the sponsor in the popup. I suspect a sponsor would pay a lot more for this sort of treatment versus banner ads around the site.

One version of this is the concept of “unlocking” the site. The idea is that when the paywall pops up, instead of asking the user to pay, there’s language that says, “this would normally cost money, but thanks to [sponsor], they’ve unlocked it and made it available to you.” Suddenly, a lot of content is made available to the audience that might otherwise have stayed locked; and, you’ve generated a lot more money since this is more of an interaction advertisement.

One important caveat to this strategy is that you should acquire the user’s email in the process. Unlocking the site is great, but these should all become folks that you market to if they’ve read a certain amount of content. Having that email is a critical part of the strategy.

Another implementation could be tied to lead generation. Let’s say a subscription to a B2B publication costs $100 per quarter, and a typical lead gen campaign results in a $100 per lead price. If you incentivized the reader to give their lead in exchange for access to the site for a quarter, you’ve made the same amount of money.

There are problems with this, the major one being that the sponsor might get lower quality leads. But this is where you come back to the CDP. Put a registration wall up first that asks for the person’s job title and if that job title comes back as the target function for the sponsor, give them this offer. If not, don’t make this offer available to the reader. Now you’re driving the right leads to sponsors. And now you’ve got an email to market to when the quarter is up. Win-win.

What if you’re a media company that doesn’t charge a subscription? Who cares? Use the subscription as decoy pricing to drive more attention to the interactive advertisement, lead gen or data consent. Maybe a reader will decide that their best choice is to pay to subscribe. There are risks associated with this since subscription businesses require operational support like anything else.

As more publishers start leaning into generating stronger reader revenue, racing to launch a paywall becomes the standard solution. Rather than purely pushing the subscription business—and likely losing a large number of folks—find ways to give users the choice over how they are monetized. One way or the other, the publisher is going to make much more money.

Ultimately, the way to grow LTVs is to put the right offer in front of the right reader. By extending that logic and giving readers more choice in how they’re monetized, operators can grow revenue. And if the outcome is more people realize the value of paying for a subscription, all the better.