Question
My partner has been a writer for big name websites in the past. My experience has been in developing, implementing and selling technology solutions.
In the 1.5 years since the launch we have between 25-50K unique visitors a month to the website. The website has covered big name events like the VMA's, the Tony's, and Comicon. We have nearly 1,000 articles on the website with over 100 contributing authors. The brand is getting pretty well known, with people talking about us and an interview that was done but not published for Page 6.
Our business model was to use Google Adwords to put up ads on the website to generate revenue. We would then pay our writers based on the traffic they generated, and keep a percentage of the revenue for ourselves. In one year we have only done $100 USD in Google Adwords revenue. Not even enough to pay the hosting bills for the site much less the writers.
We are now searching for help or a new partner that has experience in this industry, so we can turn this into a business. If anyone is interested in leading the organization they must be NYC based. If you have built a business on advertising revenue in the B2C space and have advice I'd love to learn from you.
Answer
The realities of media and publishing are such that it requires massive audience to effectively monetize any content.
It's awesome you guys have built up 25-50K in visitors monthly , but realistically the cost of actually building a 10-15MM unique user audience (profitable) monthly is WAY out of the range of possible for most people/start-ups.
Your sweet-spot and skill so far has been to CREATE CONTENT, and arguably content that a group of people (25k-50k) want to consume.
You will need to look elsewhere for audience - you need to syndicate your content and get paid by larger trafficked properties who are looking for solid programming around specific topics your covering.
This is a very real and tangible way to create predictable revenues month-2-month from your publication.
Happy to give you examples.
-MD
