Content upgrades – active monetisation

A widespread type of active monetisation is to provide so-called content upgrades for blog posts. These are usually in the form of audio books or videos on a certain topic.

Monetisation with content upgrades
By the way, this works the same way in reverse. If you provide a podcast or video series for free, you can provide the transcript to your video and audio content as a paid content upgrade.

Monetisation via paywalls

Another concept that is often used (mostly by online newspapers) are so-called paywalls.

If you read an article of such an online newspaper, you will notice at the latest halfway through that it says: “Please buy this article to finish reading it”. This method uses the concept of the reading sample and charges a price for the complete article. You can also offer the reading sample and show the full content only to subscribers who have a paid subscription with you.

Should you decide on such a monetisation, where people can only see the content of the website against payment, you have to be aware that everything behind the paywall cannot be indexed by Google or other search engines. This means that your content will not be discoverable on Google (and if it is, then only very poorly), in contrast to monetisation with AdSense advertising “ads”. These are simply displayed between the content and still allow you to rank on Google.

Content upgrades | Growing demands | Less good for SEO

Another consequence of so-called paywalls is that the demands on your blog posts grow enormously. In the past, it was normal to charge money for researched content (see all newspapers). Today (in times of online advertising, Adsense and the global ease of obtaining information) it looks a bit different. The expectations of the people who come to your website must be satisfied by your content, so that they can decide for themselves whether this price is justified for this content.

Paywalls are particularly suitable for information that only you can offer. If there is another provider who offers the same information on his website and simply spikes it with ads from Google, it is practically guaranteed that your visitors will leave you and go to your competition. Since visitors to your competitor’s site don’t have to pay for it themselves, but are financed by advertisers to view their ads between the content. For the end user, the visit and the consumption of the content is thus free of charge and the website operator receives his money, but for the advertising and not directly for his work.