Often when I introduce myself as a Software Developer to people, I get asked if I could program XXXX program. It could be a website, it could be a desktop product, it could simply be an idea. But they all have one thing in common. They are all great idea’s, but with no idea on monetisation.
I think too many people have what I call the “Twitter” mentality going through them. You see, Twitter has been up for so long, without making a penny. Albeit they are losing millions every year they stay up with no income. Twitter is just one of those strange cases where everything kind of fell together and landed in the right place. If several years ago, Someone said that instead of updating your myspace, bebo or facebook with your status, you would update it on a site with only 140 characters. People would have laughed. I still laugh. In anycase, Investors liked the idea and they poured millions into it.
People I meet on the street do not have this luxury.
Not everyone has the capacity to sway angel investors. And it is this key difference why I try and avoid doing “blind” programming for someone in the hope of making it big.
So where is all this going? Well one of my favorite websites Reddit.com is in the financial crapper. They aren’t in a hole yet, but they are getting fairly close to it by the sounds of it. There was this blog post here about how many pages they serve, and how things have grown over the past year : http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html
So if you read that through, they mention that they are serving 280 million webpages a month. Most people would think, “Plaster it with ads”. But the problem is that original idea, that original design that they did never really took into account ads. The whole point of reddit was to get a nice friendly interface to read current news. Almost like a digg.com, with better stories, better algo’s, and a cleaner website. No where did ads or even monetization in it’s broadest form fit into that original concept.
Reddit has tried the “promoted article” method. Where by you pay for your news submission (Often just an ad for your own site), and it gets boosted up to the top in the front page, or shows on the side. Kind of what Twitter is doing now, and what Digg has been doing for quite some time. Heck, pretty much the same as what Google does with it’s search results. But obviously it doesn’t pay the bills. Part of this is the demographic, part of it is the visibility of ads. They aren’t integrated that well, and are never enticing to click. The type of people that go to reddit are not interested in ads at all, and most if not all visitors are anti-ads in the first place.
One of the best comments to come out of the whole shakeup, is the fact that reddit could simply replace their site search with Google’s custom search. It is free to use, would reduce load on the server (Searches are probably the heaviest thing you can do), and you can monetize with ads on the site of the search results. Unfortunately these calls have gone largely unheard, mostly because once again, the site is all about the user experience. They don’t want some tacky Google search results with ads on their website.
But at the end of the day, when you are serving approx 280 million pageviews a month, you need to have a plan in place to monetize. An idea just isn’t enough…
Ideas, I would think, are never enough. You need to take action on any idea to make it come to life, and monetize, if you want to make money.
One of the other things about the way the web, is that people do not expect to pay for content…
What would you do to monetize it?
I probably wouldn’t have built the site with a no-ad mindset in the first place. I think that is the first issue. Is that they don’t want to implement ads, but they want to make money. They also don’t want to charge users. So where do you go from there?
Personally, I have never used their advertising platform. But from the ROI’s I have heard from it, it needs far better targeting to make it profitable for advertisers.
@ Hellen: YOUR CUTE !!
Did any of you try Reddits sponsored links with good results? I wonder what is the average bid to get up there.
I can guarantee Helen’s profile will soon be replaced with a CPALead gateway. She is just doing the rounds, commenting on a tonne of blogs to get interest, then she will monetize it
. Infact, likely a guy who found stock images 
. Could be wrong, but seen it many times before. I just approved the comment to keep track of when the site changes.
I personally haven’t used the reddit ads because I don’t have anything that will sit well with that audience. Most people I know used iPhone apps (They developed the games themselves then advertised them on there), and they didn’t make a positive ROI.
you are absolutely right about Helen’s profile