Ask HN: How to monetize 5 million+ pageview Twitter widget?

It would be helpful to know what the widget is to better come up with useful ideas. But its perfectly understandable that you don't want to share that.

Could you add a link on the bottom of the widget to get people to click through to your ad-driven site?

Evil way: sell links that you add to the widget to advertisers.

Hard way: upsell "enterprise" versions of the widget to just a few (very expensive) customers.

Good luck!

$5000 ... you could make some decent money at just a $1 cpm. talk to some ad networks or just sell directly. what kind of sites generate the most pageviews? holy shit, 5 million is a lot of page views. i guess widgets are a great distribution model.

or you could just sell it to websites looking to SEO ^_^ reminds me of the dating site or whatever that had those surveys that people embedded everywhere, that's how they got to #2 or something for "free online dating"

To add to the idea of enterprise, perhaps you could offer some paid moderation service.

Here's how I'd do it... I'd massage this a bit with some closed alpha testing, etc... but this is the gist:

Sell ads and kickback a percentage to the siteowners while working in charity donations to remind folks that you're not evil.

Create a script to categorize your install base. Eg: Gadgets, Tech, Food, Personal, etc. In version 2, plan to categorize in real-time contextually. A good ad network partnership (see below) will help you with this technology.

Change your TOS. Send an e-mail to everyone asking them to verify that your script categorized them properly, to check out the new TOS and the new ad feature. Clearly and honestly tell them why you're making this change - the project will die if you don't.

Test some "run of network" ads. Input a few different variations, measure clicks (volume and geo are important).

After a couple of weeks, approach a few different ad networks at the same time. An Adtech conference is coming up in NY in November... use their exhibitor list as a hit list.

Negotiate with the ad networks. Depending on the demographics and CTR's, I bet with a 5m install base, you'll have some good offers. Reliability is key here - ad networks start and stop all of the time. In contrast, remember that big networks come with more constraints.

Here's the part that's going to keep this from being evil: Allow your siteowners to sign up and insert their own affiliate / user codes. Give them a percentage of the ads. If someone does not sign up, give that same portion to a charity such as Kiva.

As an alternative to selling ads - start looking to sell the whole thing. There are a few funded startups I can think of that would keep your beer fridge full for a couple of years in exchange for what you have built.

As a final (tacked on edit) idea: Survey your siteowners. With such a large install base, if you ask what advanced features people would like, you may be able to get some people to upgrade to a paid subscription model. You might be able to use this in conjunction with the adrev model above. In your survey, don't give the siteowners any ideas - you don't want to sway them.

This might be slightly deceptive... but you could try adding affiliate codes to all links to product websites (Amazon, NewEgg, etc.)

edit: URL shorteners might make this difficult, but still possible if you can keep the widget responsive enough while following links server-side.

    This is a twitter <a href="http://bit.ly/blah"
    onclick="document.location='http://yourservers.com/follow?url=' +
    escape(this.href);return false">link</a>.

Ask your users if they'd mind you including VigLink or something like it in your widget. It monetizes outbound hyperlinks that are already on the page by rewriting them to be affiliate links when there's a relevant program. It doesn't change the behavior of the site and doesn't overwrite any that are already affiliated. If your users value what you're doing they shouldn't mind you harnessing a little potential that they're leaving on the table. I'd definitely recommend disclosing it though - people will get pissed if you do it silently. Upside is it's totally fire and forget.

If it's a typical sidebar widget ignore the 'talk to an ad network' suggestions. If standard IAB banner sizes aren't right for your widget (and I really don't see how you'd cram one into a widget), then ad networks have nothing for you.

Don't price this by the impression. If your advertisers are thinking CPM they'll rapidly start evaluating what this untargeted, run-of-network inventory is worth, which is likely close to zero. You won't get a $1.00 CPM if you price it by the impression. You'll be lucky to get a $0.20 CPM.

Instead, I'd try and sell a few sponsorships, Deck Network style, each sponsorship granting a share of the traffic for at least a month and for at least a four-figure sum each. The audience is looking at a Twitter widget, so your natural audience is Twitter-related businesses. Develop an unobtrusive text-based ad unit, something like the promos for Twitter clients that Twitter itself runs on twitter.com, and then pitch it to every Twitter-related business you can find.

Remember, high prices for a big share of a really relevant audience and do whatever you can to keep them from thinking about the inventory in terms of CPM, because five million ad impressions is not a hell of a lot when rationally priced. You need to do a lot of hand waving and sprinkle a lot of fairy dust ('reaching key influencers', etc.) to sell such a small amount of inventory for a meaningful amount.

perhaps put a flattr link on it?

https://flattr.com/

Maybe you should also look into reducing the bandwidth cost: check your expiration headers, smaller html/images/css/Javascript, etc. Use Google App engine to get some free traffic, etc.

Any chance you can find a buyer?

You could stick "sponsored" tweets into the twitter feed.

does the widget show a user account's recent tweets? or just the last tweet?

or is it a general/search/trending list?

The OneRiot RiotWise Ad API might be right for you:

http://oneriotdevelopernetwork.com/riotwise-api/

You have the option of text ads (typically trending news stories, so they're less spammy than typical ads), small display ads, or full ad units. Additionally, OneRiot's whole approach is real-time/trending information, so it's well within the Twitter-ish sphere.

I have some friends who have used it and reported good CTR and positive (or non-negative) user reactions to the ads.

What space restrictions (banner sizes) are you looking at? I run FeaturedUsers.com and this sounds like something that would be interesting to look at. Not sure how the insertion would work since we do JS insertion based on domains ourselves, but definitely worth looking at.

My contact info is on the site.

Place a text ad for a quality Twitter related affiliate product. Start making commissions. A few I know of...

- http://socialoomph.com

- http://sponsoredtweets.com

- http://tweetadder.com

I would just use hte widget to drive traffic to that Twitter-related site and then just work the site to make more money.

It would help to know what your widget actually did, but here's a freemium pitch: make your widget free for the first X views / mo., and then show ads, unless your user subscribes for $Y / mo.

By show ads, I mean, after some domain has gotten X views, break the widget and show the biggest ad you can.

http://ad.ly/ has been testing an ad network for stream-based applications (those that interact with timeline-based media like Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace's new interface). Ad.ly presented at http://appnationconference.com/ yesterday, both as part of a panel for monetizing the app-based stream, and a break-out panel showing a sample application that includes monetization.

partner with a re-targeting company or a behavioural-targeting network that lets them place a cookie.

this way no ad needs to be shown, you can work on some annual deal with the partner for the first year, and your audiences see more relevant content/ads as they leave your widget since the network knows a little bit more about what the visitors interests are courtesy of your widget. also since this is not personally non identifiable data - there's no harm to users also.

i could give you more gyan, if you could contact me personally @bosky101

~B

Off the top of my head, the value is in the data and analysis that the widget can capture and provide.

Can you track which sites embed the widget? What else can tracked?

My company runs a contextual advertising network that could be plugged in with your widget on your publishers pages.

(Can also do non-obtrusive text links which should be more acceptable to your publisher base than banners)

We could really help with the entire monetize using advertising strategy but our service is currently not public.

Contact me offline for details (see profile). (Sorry can't reveal corporate info at this point, apropos of not being public)

I'd be very interested in knowing what your site was. My email can be retrieved via my profile/blog. Maybe my similar experience can help you.

In a previous life, I ran tag-board.com, which placed a little javascript widget on your website that let your users interact with each other much like an irc channel. This was before ajax was even coined a term. The site still exists, but it's run down and I don't have anything to do with it anymore.

When I first started it, I never thought more than 100 people would ever use it. At it's peak, there were 600k accounts and tons of traffic that went along with that. At first I didn't care to make money, I was just happy that people used something I created, but when I realized I would need more than a $5/month hosting account, I started looking into options.

The first plan was actually a premium model - hack up a bunch of new features that would only be available to paying users and sell accounts for $20/year. It worked, and might for you as well. At some point, I had over 1,000 paying users.

After awhile, the problem was that hosting costs of the free accounts were eating a good part of the profits on the paid accounts AND I was spending a ton of time on maintainance. I felt responsible for pretty decent uptime/performance/bug-freeness since I had people paying money. A friend of mine pointed out that the amount of time/stress I was putting into this wasn't worth the money. This made a ton of sense to me. At that point, I strongly considered just keeping paying users alive until their year ran out, and then axing the whole thing. I then realized that if I was willing to get rid of all my free users anyway, I might as well try something aggressive - I found an ad network and ran popups on the non-premium accounts. This was ~2002. To my surprise, I got fairly minimal grief, more premium signups, no noticeable drop in usage, and enough income to make it worth my while to keep going. This lasted awhile, but popup revenue slowly dried up - firefox and other browsers started killing the popups. I had handed the whole thing off to someone else well before that happened though.

If I were to do it again, I think I'd do the obvious thing that nobody recommended and just charge everyone for the service, although a much smaller fee (maybe $5/yr). I'd let people sign up for free, use the account for a month, and then switch it over to showing an "ad" of sorts on the owner's website where the widget otherwise would be. Clicking through would let the user interact with the widget, but on the "ad" would also be an option for a user of the website to buy the site owner a subscription to this widget. This would dramatically increase the number of potential customers and would essentially be like a tip jar for the website owner. Users could buy the widget as a gift for a website they like to use. At the same time, I wouldn't try to stop people from just creating a new account and getting another month of free usage, but I'd annoy them forcing them to do this every month.

I don't actually know if this would work, but I think it would. I suspect there would be fewer users. However, as a side benefit, you would know what this is worth to those users, which is a nice feeling. The negative here that scares many people from going this route is that if you suddenly start charging, you really do have to provide a service. You can't go down for 2 weeks. And you have to do a little bit of customer service (emails, refunds, fix bugs) or find someone to do it for you.