Generating Revenue from Your OpenPublish Website
For years, publishers have been moving in droves from high cost, proprietary or hand-built CMS systems to open source. Lately, it's been happing at an extraordinary rate. Their frustration with deploying flexible, revenue-driven products to their bloated and rigid CMS platforms has finally reached a tipping point. Drupal is now filling a gap in the publishing industry that is undeniable. Journalist Paul Conley said it best in a 2010 Semantic Web interview:
"Drupal represents an opportunity for dozens and dozens of B2B publishers to undo the mistake that they made again and again on the Web — paying extraordinary amounts of money to build proprietary content-management systems or paying extraordinary amounts of money to buy or lease someone else’s CMS — only to find that you have to pay even more for every tweak, add-on or enhancement known to man. Drupal is free. The development community is extensive. Drupal is nearly perfect. Companies should stop thinking of it as a language or a CMS and start thinking of it as salvation."
Specifically, monetizing for the web poses massive challenges for dynamic and forward-thinking publishing organizations, both B2B and news organizations. Generating more and more revenue with smaller budgets is a tall order, but it’s a relatively simple challenge we can overcome using Drupal. Here, I'll outline several strategies for monitoring your online content, many of which can be quickly implemented using standard functionality found in our OpenPublish distribution.
Ad serving
One of the oldest (and best) tricks in the content monetization book is online advertising. OpenPublish installs with templates that support most standard ad sizes, and for simple ad serving requirements, all you need to do is plug in your ad scripts. Complex or unique ad serving requirements are also no problem in OpenPublish. Ads can be targeted based on content channels, topics, user preference, or even viewing behaviors. Advertisers are happier because they’re getting more click-throughs thanks to that targeted marketing and publishers are happier because they’re getting more subscribers and advertisers. In a post from a few months ago, I outlined several ad targeting strategies, all of which can be implemented with small amounts of customization in OpenPublish.
Premium content
Gating premium content for readers with a paid subscription is becoming increasingly popular. OpenPublish installs with the ability to protect articles and media for readers with a designated role or status, presumably a paid subscription. It's quick and easy to configure your site to force users to login and identify themselves before being allowed to view certain content. This feature helps you monetize by encouraging readers to sign up for paid subscriptions.
Content metering
The New York Times is making waves while it prepares to launch a new content metering model. Readers are allowed a certain number of free article views per month before being forced to login with a paid Internet-only (or print) subscription. As a consumer of news, expect to start seeing this more and more, while traditional newspapers grapple with declining print-based revenues. Customizations can easily be made to OpenPublish to support this model of content monetization.
Content sponsorship
An alternative to per-click advertising through an ad service is to offer paid sponsorship of particular content pieces. This is a popular model for B2B publishers, and increases revenue streams from partners. One way of doing this is to ask users to fill out a short survey in order to capture a lead, before allowing them to proceed to a sponsored piece, like a white paper, for example. With small customizations to OpenPublish, this model and other variants like it are easily implemented.
Whatever your content monetization goals are, Drupal and OpenPublish can be used to provide those revenue streams in a quick and low-cost manner. No longer should your advertising stakeholders be at the mercy of inflexible and stress-inducing CMS platforms.
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