TLDR: How would you monetize a mid-sized audience of consumers on an event discovery website?<p>Longer Version:<p>We are a small, bootstrapped startup that has built our audience up over the last 5 years while working on it nights/weekends. We now get a large amount of traffic in September and October - the trailing 31 day analytics count is just over 1 million visitors. Most of the visitors are looking for events.<p>Our monetization options are:<p>eCommerce - We initially tried eCommerce selling Halloween costumes. It was pretty time consuming, inventory goes out of stock all the time, and it is a once a year purchase that is not monthly recurring. When we had trouble growing our traffic of costume purchasers, we put it on the back burner.<p>Advertising - The obvious monetization method now is to sell advertising. In our case, this could mean large corporations targeting our audience or it could mean events that would purchase a featured/premium advertisement to consumers in their area.<p>Business Services - We could take the next 6 months, talk to the events that we currently drive traffic to, and try to build a product for them.<p>The obstacles: We don't have much (if any) money to put into the venture right now. We probably don't have bandwidth to do more than one at a time.<p>The good things: Traffic is growing about 50% year-over-year. We really don't need much money to be able to continue to grow. If we could get revenue on an interim basis to $50-100K/year, we'd be very happy.<p>I'd love to hear thoughts on how to tackle monetization.
Ads for affiliate products corresponding to the event could work, e.g. high quality (cannot stress this enough!) products from Amazon. Say, for paintball meetups it would be accessories/clothing/etc... This creates a win-win-win situation - the visitor gets a recommendation for a high quality product that is relevant and they may be interested in, you get a 4 or 8% from each sale, and the amazon seller gets to make a sale.