Making Revenue in the New Media Business

Media Business

So how does it all work? This is a question I ask myself on a periodic basis just to check my assumptions and make sure I don’t lose sight of what can be built.

I am lucky enough to run a media business. What does that mean? It means I look after the production of content and how we capture revenue for it.

Anything you produce on the Internet, if you’re good at and enough people interact with it, eventually you’ll want to get paid for it. But how?

Let me count the ways

Before you try any of these you need to have - you guessed it some critical mass of people that are looking at your stuff, and continue to engage with your content. You need a way to promote your content to get more people engaged.

Let’s talk channels and then flesh out revenue models.

General Advertising

YouTube - You need at least 1,000 subscribers or 4,000 watch hours in the past 12 months to start collecting revenue through Google.

Spotify - No rule of thumb here, but you can join Ambassador Ads program once you hit a 100 subscribers over a 60 day period. Many other Podcast platforms will have ad programs once you hit 2,000 downloads. All of these ad programs are for dynamically inserted ads. (Apple is similar)

Websites - Normally to make revenue in this channel you need pageviews and lots of them. You can work with the usual suspects like AdSense or Ramp(Ad Thrive) and these will be inserts on your site that are place holders for ads that will be served. If you’re on WordPress there are integrations to make this happen.

Just be mindful in any of the above situations you’re working with third parties, they are going to take a chunk of that ad revenue. Most likely 50%. So if you have a growing audience with high CPMs (we think about revenue in terms of cost per thousand, M stands for mille or thousand in Latin), you’re giving half to your ad “partner.”

Here are the estimated average CPMs (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) rates for the categories mentioned:

CPM Rates Ranges:

• Finance: $8 - $15

• Technology: $5 - $10

• Automotive: $6 - $12

• Healthcare: $3 - $7

• Education: $2 - $6

• Retail: $2 - $5

• Travel: $4 - $9

These figures are estimates (a lot of the data comes from Google) and can fluctuate. In finance, those rates can well exceed $100 if you have the right group.

Those rates will also vary based on the quality of the ad, and if the group targeted is broad or specific (hint, if you can target large numbers of people that have expressed interest in your topic the rate is higher.) The more you know about your audience, including the data you have collected about their interests, the better your ability to target and get higher revenue dollars via CPM.

Other Revenue Sources

Donations - Yes you can ask for a handout. For content creators looking to accept donations, there are several great apps and platforms available. Think of these as support for the traditional starving artist. You can also think of them as a test bed for subscriptions.

• Ko-fi: This platform is super popular among creators. It gives you a unique URL to share on social media and lets you set donation goals, like funding new equipment.

• Buy Me A Coffee: Similar to Ko-fi, it allows you to set goals and provides a unique URL. It also offers an official WordPress plugin for easy integration with your site.

• Patreon: A bit different from the others, Patreon offers a monthly-based support system, creating a steady stream of income from your fans.

• Liberapay: This app is another option for creators to receive donations and support their work.

Direct Sponsorship or Advertising - This is where you want to get to, the direct game. In the direct game, you have a large enough audience and the associated data for that audience to make targeting worthwhile for an advertiser. This is where you can work with advertisers directly and capture media spend without a middleman. Honestly, it’s tough to do and you have to be big enough; which means different things in different markets.

Merchandise - You can set up a store and sell mugs, t-shirts, hats, or whatever your thing is. Mileage may vary and once you get into physical goods you have to think about cost of goods sold, inventory and profit margins.

Creators looking to sell their merchandise have a variety of popular storefronts to choose from. Here are some of the most commonly used platforms:

• Teespring: A platform that allows creators to design and sell custom merchandise with no upfront costs.

• Printful: Offers comprehensive services for printing and shipping custom merchandise, including integration with other e-commerce platforms.

• Spring: Known for its ease of use and integration with social media platforms.

• Shopify: A complete e-commerce solution that provides creators with the tools to create a custom online store.

• Bonfire: Specializes in custom apparel and offers features like free design templates and fundraising capabilities.

• Redbubble: An online marketplace for print-on-demand products created by independent artists.

• Merch by Amazon: Amazon's dedicated platform for creators to sell custom merchandise like t-shirts, hoodies, and more.

Each platform provides various features such as print-on-demand services, drop shipping, and integrations to help creators monetize their brand and reach a wider audience.

Events - If you really have an audience you can do events. By far this is the trickiest thing in creation. Holding an event means you have to have appeal in a local area, with enough of a draw to get people to pay for a ticket, while covering the costs of a venue.  It’s not for the faint of heart and most of the really big content creators do this. When I mean big, usually we’re talking millions of downloads or views with audiences that are national or global.

However you can hold events as meetups with fans as a low cost promotion strategy and not a revenue generator.

Newsletters

Why did I single out newsletters?

Newsletters are gaining ground. They're direct, personal. They engage. People read them, stay longer. That one item alone is the key: engagement means higher open rates. Open rate means just what it says, the percentage of open emails out of all the emails you sent. They are the ones that get read. Higher opens means your advertiser gets more impressions and usually more clicks.

Email is growing. Newsletters are key for leads.

• Daily email users are at a whopping 4 billion and are expected to hit 4.6 billion by 2025. (That’s more than ½ the world’s population of 8.1 billion)

• Over 347 billion emails are sent and received each day.

• 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers.

• The daily exchange of emails worldwide was around 333 billion in 2022, and it’s forecasted to reach 392.5 billion by 2026.

Newsletters are like the secret sauce for hooking in fans. B2B marketers are all over them because they're like magnets for eyeballs. People actually read the content, and that's gold for turning casual readers into solid leads.

It's not just about the cash flow. It's about connecting with your audience and growing your brand. You have to interact with your audience, and that's where being smart with surveys and knowing who's who comes into play.

Take a YouTube channel with a ton of followers. Sure, you can ask them stuff on YouTube, but remember, they're really Google's audience, not yours. Google's got the stats, but you can't really connect with your fans one-on-one. That's why you have to bring them over to your turf, where you call the shots.

This is why all the large audience creators are pushing their own apps or newsletters. They wanna talk to their fans directly, get the feedback to make their content even better, and yes, bump up those ad rates. Because more ad revenue in the end, supports creating more, and better content.

Tweets or Zeets?