Hello gang,<p>I've been running a website for 8 years. We still have great visits, but our eCPM has been dropping monthly for years now. Ads are also becoming increasingly bloated, leading to slower and slower load-times for the website.<p>Back in December I switched from "http" to "https", unaware that doing so would rule out a few of my ad networks who don't support https. As a result, our revenue dropped 80%.<p>Anyway... I don't know what to do at this point. For those curious, the site is www.indieshuffle.com -- and right now we're serving ~600,000 ad impressions a day with a ~20% fill at... roughly $0.10 eCPM. Would love to know if you have any tips or suggestions.
How about some premium features for $x a month rather than relying on ads? Asking your most loyal users for $5 a month to hide all ads could get some decent traction. In my experience, users are willing to pay for products they use regularly, but a lot of sites are scared to ask for money.<p>If you're getting 600k ad impressions per day then your visitor numbers must be fairly high so even a marginal uptake of the premium features would probably beat that $0.1CPM<p>Look to Mixcloud for inspiration <a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/premium/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mixcloud.com/premium/</a><p>Also Promoted Posts (i.e. highlighted tracks) may work but you'd need to test if your user base is happy with this as I presume they value your independent voice.
Some ideas to earn extra revenue for your site<p>- charge for featured listings that appear more prominently on your site.
- place music related amazon and itune affiliate links
- integrate outbrain or taboola