Have you noticed how many websites entice you with provocative headlines? Often the headline is accompanied by a thumbnail. So you click the link and the site loads, bombarding you with adverts, videos, mailing list sign-ups and the rest. These websites do this because they want to make money. The links are known as ‘click-bait’.
And here lies the monetisation mistake.
If there was a genuine interest in sharing news, messages, interesting discoveries and the rest then things would be different. But at the present time many websites are simply in existence to make their owners money.
In the early ’90s we were told to prepare for the information super-highway. This would revolutionise our lives with fast access to data.
The reality some 25 years on is a little different.
For a start the term ‘information super-highway’ was dropped long ago in favour of ‘the Internet’. And we now are in a culture of ‘monetisation’.
So really the Internet is being used by many as a form of gold mining.
That’s not to say there’s no innovation or new ideas. But the simple reality on a day to-day basis is that more and more sites seem to be happy to cover their content in advertisements.
These advertisements usually have nothing to do with the original website. Or anything to do with the original content.
News Aggregators best for latest info.
Over the last six months I’ve been testing news aggregators. There is a good one from Apple called ‘News’ and a few on the Android platform. These aggregators take feeds from lots of sources and combine them into categorised news collections. Each aggregator allows you to completely customise the content.
The main thing I’ve observed is that content is cleaner in the aggregators. So you get the story without all the ads.
For example Wales Online have lots of stories relating to my locality. On the aggregators the Wales Online stories are organised and load really fast. If I then go to the Wales Online website to find the same story I meet video overlays and video inserts that play automatically. This is while I’m trying to read an article. So I turn off the ads and then the page jumps around while it loads another set of ads.
By this time I’m thinking to leave the site and go back to the news aggregator. Can you relate to this?
An interesting app called Medium is another slightly different tool and I’m just checking it out at the moment. It’s aimed at ‘writers and thinkers’ but so far seems full of things like ’10 ways to look clever in meetings’.
Do you need it?
If you’re a website owner you should ask yourself. Do adverts undermine your messages?
Are there other ways to get this website to pay for itself and make extra?