As you could probably tell by my latest entries, I've been spending the last couple weeks finding different ways to monetize the site. Wopular has about 400k-500k unique visitors per month, according to Google Analytics. That's a decent amount of users. It's about time I stopped coding new features and started earning. There's a certain challenge with monetizing an aggregation site, but I'm not gonna talk in depth about it here. I'll save that for another article. Mainly, it's that the average user only views a couple pages, compare to several with the average content site. My monetization attempts are passive. I don't actively go out and find advertisers. I just sign up for different types of ad networks and have them do all the work for me and split the revenue. Here's what I have going with Wopular.

LEADERBOARD & MEDIUM RECTANGLE
For both of these units, I chained together three ad networks - AdsDaq, PubAccess, and Casale. This is a solid bunch. I used to have Adbrite and AdSense in the chain, but they weren't performing. That gives me a decent fill rate. I'm still left witth a decent chunk of international traffic, about 10-20%, that I'm not able to monetize. Every network I threw at it came back zero. A site owner told me they were thinking about not serving pages to international users because it's just a waste of bandwidth. It's surprising that no one has filled this advertising void yet.

468x180 TEASER UNITS
Right under the article teasers, I use Chitika to monetize search traffic. Only users coming from search engines will see these units. My regulars won't see them at all. It's nice because it's an extra ad space.

IN-TEXT ADS
I'm sticking with Infolinks because they pay better than Kontera, although you really can't go wrong with Kontera - they pay decent, are easy to set up, and the ads are highly relevant to the content of the page.

POP-UNDER & FULL-PAGE ADS
I'm using Casale for Pop-unders and AdBrite for Full-Page ads. Both pay about the same, although I think Casale is more consistent. They pay much more than banner ads, four to ten times more.

AFFILIATE PROGRAMS
Currently, I'm using Amazon, but I will throw Netflix into the mix soon. I'm using them on the Chitika space for non-search traffic. So far, Amazon's not doing much for me even though their products are pretty relevant to the page content. I read that you just have to experiment and find a couple that works and just stick with them.

EXTERNAL LINKS
I was thinking about implementing ad networks that pay for sending traffic to other sites. Wopular has a lot of links to external sites, so it's a great candidate for these kind of networks. The two ad networks I looked into were LinkBee.com and LinkBucks.com. These two ad networks would replace your external links with their links, and then gives you a banner ad, Full-Page ad, or pop-up before sending you to the external site. I couldn't use LinkBee because I would have to use their widget to manually create and replace each external link on Wopular. I played around with their API to automate this process, but I decided not to implement it yet because it could be a resource hog on my servers (or theirs). I tested out LinkBucks for a couple days because they already have that automated process in place. I shelved them later because they had a very annoying bug - if you chose Full Page ads, those ads would often also send you a pop-up; if you chose the pop-up option, sometimes you get two pop-ups simultaneously; the banner option pays too little. I also read later that they had malware on their ads in the past and was even temporarily black-listed by Google because of it. I might revisit LinkBee later since they pay four times more than LinkBucks, and I haven't heard anything negative about them yet.

TIME TO WORK ON OTHER THINGS
Like I said before, the nice thing about ad networks is you don't really have to do anything after you set them up. All you have to do afterwards is concentrate on increasing your traffic to increase revenue. It's a passive approach, but unless you have the time, energy, and skills to actively pursue advertisers, this is not bad. One problem with being a one-man team is, you can only focus on one thing at a time. While I was spending time finding ways to monetize my traffic, site development and marketing fell by the wayside. I also took a slight traffic hit too. With this ad setup in place, I can now focus on building new features and marketing the site to get more traffic.