
Ask HN: How to make money as a digital publisher in 2017? - jasongrishkoff
Hello gang,<p>I&#x27;ve been running a website for 8 years. We still have great visits, but our eCPM has been dropping monthly for years now. Ads are also becoming increasingly bloated, leading to slower and slower load-times for the website.<p>Back in December I switched from &quot;http&quot; to &quot;https&quot;, unaware that doing so would rule out a few of my ad networks who don&#x27;t support https. As a result, our revenue dropped 80%.<p>Anyway... I don&#x27;t know what to do at this point. For those curious, the site is www.indieshuffle.com -- and right now we&#x27;re serving ~600,000 ad impressions a day with a ~20% fill at... roughly $0.10 eCPM. Would love to know if you have any tips or suggestions.
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siquick
How about some premium features for $x a month rather than relying on ads?
Asking your most loyal users for $5 a month to hide all ads could get some
decent traction. In my experience, users are willing to pay for products they
use regularly, but a lot of sites are scared to ask for money.

If you're getting 600k ad impressions per day then your visitor numbers must
be fairly high so even a marginal uptake of the premium features would
probably beat that $0.1CPM

Look to Mixcloud for inspiration
[https://www.mixcloud.com/premium/](https://www.mixcloud.com/premium/)

Also Promoted Posts (i.e. highlighted tracks) may work but you'd need to test
if your user base is happy with this as I presume they value your independent
voice.

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skyisblue
Some ideas to earn extra revenue for your site

\- charge for featured listings that appear more prominently on your site. \-
place music related amazon and itune affiliate links \- integrate outbrain or
taboola

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siquick
> integrate outbrain or taboola

As a potential user of your site, I really advise you not to fill your site
with this clickbait crap.

