
Ask HN: How to monetize 1M visitors in a month - funtober
TLDR: How would you monetize a mid-sized audience of consumers on an event discovery website?<p>Longer Version:<p>We are a small, bootstrapped startup that has built our audience up over the last 5 years while working on it nights&#x2F;weekends.  We now get a large amount of traffic in September and October - the trailing 31 day analytics count is just over 1 million visitors.  Most of the visitors are looking for events.<p>Our monetization options are:<p>eCommerce - We initially tried eCommerce selling Halloween costumes.  It was pretty time consuming, inventory goes out of stock all the time, and it is a once a year purchase that is not monthly recurring.  When we had trouble growing our traffic of costume purchasers, we put it on the back burner.<p>Advertising - The obvious monetization method now is to sell advertising.  In our case, this could mean large corporations targeting our audience or it could mean events that would purchase a featured&#x2F;premium advertisement to consumers in their area.<p>Business Services - We could take the next 6 months, talk to the events that we currently drive traffic to, and try to build a product for them.<p>The obstacles:  We don&#x27;t have much (if any) money to put into the venture right now.  We probably don&#x27;t have bandwidth to do more than one at a time.<p>The good things: Traffic is growing about 50% year-over-year.  We really don&#x27;t need much money to be able to continue to grow.  If we could get revenue on an interim basis to $50-100K&#x2F;year, we&#x27;d be very happy.<p>I&#x27;d love to hear thoughts on how to tackle monetization.
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googletazer
Ads for affiliate products corresponding to the event could work, e.g. high
quality (cannot stress this enough!) products from Amazon. Say, for paintball
meetups it would be accessories/clothing/etc... This creates a win-win-win
situation - the visitor gets a recommendation for a high quality product that
is relevant and they may be interested in, you get a 4 or 8% from each sale,
and the amazon seller gets to make a sale.

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funtober
I think affiliate relationships will be our next test but haven't pursued
because our visitors value experiences over merchandise. I was hoping an
entrepreneur would setup a ticketing affiliate in our niche area but alas I
may have to do it myself.

