educational

How to Monetize Traffic

This year looks to be one of those focused years in which so many of us will be reviewing what we do well, what our businesses can do to grow or become more efficient, and finally to look in our own backyards for under or nonutilized assets to make these goals a reality. On the latter item, yes, we are talking about a good-old-fashioned "Smith Barney"-style approach to seeing what resources and dormant products can be made to generate new revenues.

An obvious place to start is with an assessment of how you generate value from procured traffic. Even while some of the biggest money to be made over the years from Internet traffic came through recurring content subscription access sales, there have been a number of companies that took a different view toward how best to monetize traffic that could be generated. Traditional agencies that deliver traffic to clients, sponsors, etc. have worked toward maintaining an effective cost-per-click through or costper- thousand impressions valuation for their inventories. While nothing new, this approach has been limited in the adult industry to a small number of firms whose traffic needs to be accounted for in a more steady and predictable fashion than getting compensated solely for sales.

Regardless of whether you presently send traffic from your adult network and get paid on a per-sale, per-click through, revenue share, clicks or impressions- based model, it is a highly recommended strategy to standardize how you value the traffic, creating an effective value per click or thousand impressions. This will help decision makers gain an alternative perspective on the value of this key asset. At the same time, it provides for a neutral base of measurement for evaluating prospective new monetization methods and revenue sources to be derived from your traffic.

In order to provide this neutral measurement standard, you need to gauge the value of traffic you send outbound and administer the delivery of traffic through a neutral management and counting platform. I will admit to obvious bias in favor of ad-serving technology to accomplish this. In our business, we have used multiple systems, including our own platform Ad Zones, to help us manage ad sales on websites that contract with us to look after the revenue side of their traffic. You also will gain a traffic count for impressions and click throughs on all types of banners and links you use to send traffic to other sites. That count is the one that matters. Every revenuebased count system, including those that are part of affiliate tracking software, will count traffic based upon criteria set by developers and their management teams that are appropriate to the needs of the company and the revenue model. Conversely, an ad server will allow you, as the sender of traffic to set the baseline of what a click through or a thousand ad impressions should be worth, in effect the ad rate.

If you have an agreement to drive 100 sales per day to a trading partner, client or sponsor, it is to your advantage as the sender to track delivery through an ad serving system so that you can see how much traffic in the form of click throughs and impressions it takes to make these sales. With that information, you can plug in the value of the sales made and figure out what an average click through sent to a sponsor is worth.

Centralized methods of sending traffic mean greater access to targeting parameters. Clients will ask you if they can purchase or have you send traffic only from certain countries. You can do that; but furthermore, you can track delivery on the same basis of impressions and click throughs, broken down per country or geographic region. Perhaps you operate a searchable directory, archive or portal type of site. If you do, the ability to serve ads to your revenue partners on a keyword-targeted basis is another profound way to affect your traffic revenue values for the better.

Ad agencies from the adult and mainstream sides of Internet media have relied on network traffic management and ad delivery systems for many years. The technologies have allowed both privately held and publicly traded firms alike to not only manage traffic delivery for the needs of both buyer and seller alike, but also to provide the means for vendors, customers and auditing groups to get access to the data they need and provide overall return on investment to the companies themselves. The value of Internet traffic management methods and mechanisms should never be underestimated.

Scott Rabinowitz is president of Traffic Dude, a company that oversees some of the highest traffic volume adult media networks in the world. For more information on the company and its offerings, visit www.trafficdude.com.

Copyright © 2024 Adnet Media. All Rights Reserved. XBIZ is a trademark of Adnet Media.
Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited.

More Articles

profile

VerifyMy Seeks to Provide Frictionless Online Safety, Compliance Solutions

Before founding VerifyMy, Ryan Shaw was simply looking for an age verification solution for his previous business. The ones he found, however, were too expensive, too difficult to integrate with, or failed to take into account the needs of either the businesses implementing them or the end users who would be required to interact with them.

Alejandro Freixes ·
opinion

How Adult Website Operators Can Cash in on the 'Interchange' Class Action

The Payment Card Interchange Fee Settlement resulted from a landmark antitrust lawsuit involving Visa, Mastercard and several major banks. The case centered around the interchange fees charged to merchants for processing credit and debit card transactions. These fees are set by card networks and are paid by merchants to the banks that issue the cards.

Jonathan Corona ·
opinion

It's Time to Rock the Vote and Make Your Voice Heard

When I worked to defeat California’s Proposition 60 in 2016, our opposition campaign was outspent nearly 10 to 1. Nevertheless, our community came together and garnered enough support and awareness to defeat that harmful, misguided piece of proposed legislation — by more than a million votes.

Siouxsie Q ·
opinion

Staying Compliant to Avoid the Takedown Shakedown

Dealing with complaints is an everyday part of doing business — and a crucial one, since not dealing with them properly can haunt your business in multiple ways. Card brand regulations require every merchant doing business online to have in place a complaint process for reporting content that may be illegal or that violates the card brand rules.

Cathy Beardsley ·
profile

WIA Profile: Patricia Ucros

Born in Bogota, Colombia, Ucros graduated from college with a degree in education. She spent three years teaching third grade, which she enjoyed a lot, before heeding her father’s advice and moving to South Florida.

Women In Adult ·
opinion

Creating Payment Redundancies to Maximize Payout Uptime

During the global CrowdStrike outage that took place toward the end of July, a flawed software update brought air travel and electronic commerce to a grinding halt worldwide. This dramatically underscores the importance of having a backup plan in place for critical infrastructure.

Jonathan Corona ·
opinion

The Need for Minimal Friction in Age Verification Technology

In the adult sector, robust age assurance, comprised of age verification and age estimation methods, is critical to ensuring legal compliance with ever-evolving regulations, safeguarding minors from inappropriate content and protecting the privacy of adults wishing to view adult content.

Gavin Worrall ·
opinion

Account-to-Account Payments: The New Banking Disruptor?

So much of our industry relies upon Visa and Mastercard to support consumer payments — and with that reliance comes increased scrutiny by both brands. From a compliance perspective, the bar keeps getting raised until it feels like we end up spending half our time making sure we are compliant rather than growing our business.

Cathy Beardsley ·
profile

WIA Profile: Samantha Beatrice

Beatrice credits the sex positivity of Montreal for ultimately inspiring her to pursue work in adult entertainment. She had many friends working in the industry, from sex workers to production teams, so it felt like a natural fit and offered an opportunity to apply her marketing and social media savvy to support people she truly believes in and wants to see succeed.

Women In Adult ·
opinion

Understanding the Latest Server Processors

Over the last decade, we mostly stopped talking about CPU performance. Recently, however, there has been a seismic and exciting change in the CPU landscape, due to innovation by a chip company called Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Brad Mitchell ·
Show More