Posted on April 1st, 2011Charging for Local Content on Your Site
Developing content that you can charge for is one of the ways that webmasters endeavor to make their websites profitable. However, a new article in Wired magazine reveals that users aren’t quite ready to pay for local content just yet. The article was specific to mobile applications that deliver local content to users, and it revealed that about 1% of them were actually willing to pay for such an application.
Many webmasters see themselves going into the news business on their websites and, hopefully, generating a bit of profit from it. Increasingly, offering a mobile version of your website is imperative toward reaching a significant amount of users. For example, a full 30% of users, or more according to some surveys, are now using their mobile devices to check their favorite Internet sites regularly. For webmasters, this has made it imperative to offer a mobile version of their website and, in some cases, to develop an application specific to mobile devices. The idea, of course, is to make money off of this endeavor but it seems like Internet users aren’t quite ready to start paying for news and articles from their local areas and that webmasters may do better to look elsewhere to generate the profits.
Third-Party Apps
Just about every web host allows users to easily install third-party applications called content management systems. These allow the easy integration of features such as live feeds from social networking websites and, in some cases, the easy creation of a mobile version of the website that they’re installed on. They also allow, in many cases, various ways to manage monetization in the form of advertising campaigns. For news sites, and for newspapers, advertising has long been the bread and butter of their income streams. Currently, it seems like this model will continue into the future, as most users aren’t willing to pay for the news and articles in and of itself, but advertisers may be willing to pay for placement on the sites.
Adding local news and articles to a site can be a fairly easy affair for most webmasters. If your web host offers one of the content management systems popular with webmasters, there are oftentimes areas on your page where you can add feeds from local sites and simply add their content to your own without really doing any work other than adding the technology. Should those providers begin charging for their content, of course, you’ll either have to pay for a subscription fee or be shut out altogether.
Where mobile technologies are concerned, it may be a better idea to rely on advertisement than to rely on visitors being willing to pay for your own content. Particularly if that content is local, users don’t seem to be too enthusiastic about paying for it just yet. For webmasters who are in the news-gathering business, this may mean that monetizing your site will require a bit of work selling advertisements to local businesses and businesses around the world to generate this income stream. Either way, mobile technologies will continue to become more important for web surfers and for those who want to monetize their own websites.