Monetization Options

[rosshill]

I run CoverHunt.com but haven't spent much time looking at monetization. Right now I just have Adsense and Amazon and I believe it could be converting a lot better than it is currently.

If you ran the site and you were getting around 750,000 pageviews per month what would you expect to earn and how would you be earning it?

[Brendan]

Ross,

First of all.. where is it hosted? I just tried accessing it and it took a little while to load.. may have been my connection, but I am on a 24mb pipe :P and if I didn't go to look at it for review, I would have closed it..

Some options I think you could try to monetize your site;
- Sell music
Each time someone clicks the cover, maybe have a link to buy this album now and have it go through to your amazon affiliate account or something?

- Sell Ringtones
Same as above but maybe you can link to selling mobile ring tones instead?

- Membership
Maybe offer a membership, say.. first few covers are free, then members pay a small subscription fee - $2-3 a month and they get access to premium covers, newsletters discounts etc..?

Also, how well is it listing in search engines? Why don't you try offering lyrics as well as covers, these should search well and attract more people again.

Hope that helps!

[KitKat]

is there any way you can offer custom covers? maybe people would like to have custom cd covers made up for them?

[rosshill]

First of all.. where is it hosted? I just tried accessing it and it took a little while to load.. may have been my connection, but I am on a 24mb pipe :P and if I didn't go to look at it for review, I would have closed it..

It is normally pretty zippy, but just went offline for a few minutes.. ouch! It is a shared server and somebody else was apparently getting a bucketload of traffic so they had to deal with it quickly. That's what you get with shared hosting though I guess

[Carl Taylor]

wow i tried looking at your site today

very slow indeed.

First up i would probably change hosts or go dedicated, just improve speed so people dont close the page before they even get to the site to possibly click on ads

i would also look at what some of the other types of sites do

for example some download sites make you view an advertisement before being able to download.

There are pay per impression ad programs out there... there is also a new one starting up called Pay Per Play... by NetAudioAds

Try to think laterally, can you setup an alliance with an online music selling company etc..

[rosshill]

Is it seriously slow? It took 4 seconds to load a results page here, and I'm on an aussie connection.. is that really too slow to load a page full of big images?

[Carl Taylor]

it took 16 secs to load the main page when i just tried it then.

before i would say it was closer to 25 secs

[rosshill]

What sort of connection do you have? I'm taking maybe 6 seconds max for the homepage, minus the Amazon flash at the bottom. And can you tell whether you are waiting for the page itself, or just the images to load?

[Brendan]

Yea I had the same problem again when accessing the site the other day, however today it seems ok.

Might be worth checking with your host if there have been any performance issues with the server recently.

[wiiman]

I'm impressed. You just got another regular visitor to your site. No seriously. It is an awesome idea and I think it has great potential.

First of all that is a great start. But I must say Google Adsense and Amazon does not work well for everyone. So here is what I would do. Join an ad network or sell ads on the site yourself. Offer free prizes and such. Get people more involved. Ad a section where they can not only download the album cover art but also comment on how they liked the album. You might consider offering free mp3 players once a month to winners in your monthly prizes. As long as it gets visitors to your site you can capture bigger bucks for your ads.