Tag Archives: Money

Does “Pay What You Want” Work?

Nov 4, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Monetization No Comments

The collective internet mind vividly remembers the “Radiohead Experiment,” when the musical group Radiohead decided to put their new album on the internet for download, but with an odd twist. They let you value their product and pay the amount you desired. You could give them a hundred dollars or three cents.

I always though it was an interesting idea, and one that could really work in some cases. Independent game developer 2D Boy is one of those cases…

2D Boy makes World of Goo, an interesting and fun physics game that retails for $20. It’s also one of the most-pirated games on the internet, with a whopping 90% piracy rate. This is a game that’s rated very highly by most sources. (It’s also one of the few games that works cross-platform on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.)

So what did 2D Boy do? They ran a Radiohead-style special for a few weeks, letting you pay what you want to download the game. The results?

World of Goo sales

Out of more than 57,000 sales, about 68% of the downloaders paid $2 or less. And 16,852 buyers only paid one cent. 7,347 were in the $5.00-$5.99 range though.

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The Highest-Earning Web Companies and Blogs

Mar 25, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Internet 3 Comments

What are the highest-earning blogs? What web companies make the most revenue annually (or per second)? IncomeDiary.com has put together a couple of posts rounding-up the top thirty of each. The lists are not necessarily all-inclusive, but they give a pretty good idea of where the sites stand.

Can you guess which website has the highest annual revenue? Google! They make $21,800,000,000 a year…or $691.27 per second. Amazing, isn’t it? Amazon is second on the list, followed by Yahoo, then eBay, MSN, PayPal, and then iTunes. NYTimes.com comes in thirtieth, with a whopping $175,000,000, which is nothing to sneeze at.

On the blogging side, TechCrunch is leading with $200,000 in monthly earnings. Mashable comes in second with a comparative value. Envato’s Tuts+ Network comes in at #8, with Smashing Magazine right behind. Quite a few recognizable names on the list.

If you’ve wondered what your favorite blogs and businesses make, these lists should give you a rough idea. Quite fun to look at.

125×125 Ads: Monetize Your Blog With the Bloggers’ Ad Format

Apr 4, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Featured, Monetization 17 Comments

When you think of monetizing a blog, what immediately comes to mind? Google’s AdSense, right? AdSense is easy to set-up, and pretty much all legitimate sites are accepted into the program, so it’s the method most bloggers use right away. However, AdSense has it’s shortcomings, as do other monetization methods. It doesn’t work well for blogs in some niches, less and less people click them, etc. Luckily, there’s a better option.

The 125×125 ad, used by “big blogs” like ProBlogger, TechCrunch, and ReadWriteWeb, they are a great way to monetize blogs. I’ve been using them for a couple of months with great success. It’s taken me a year and a half to reach $100 in AdSense earnings; meanwhile I’ve made over $140 so far by direct-selling ads.

125x125s are, as their name suggests, square ads of one hundred twenty five pixels in both directions. They’re fairly unobtrusive, unlike monstrous leaderboard banners, and they’re less susceptible to banner blindness problems. They are the Bloggers’ Ad Format, thought-up by bloggers, and suiting their style of site well. The ads are sold directly to advertisers, cutting out the ad network middleman, and leaving you with more work on your part…but the difference in income is much greater.

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Make Money By Selling T-Shirts

Oct 16, 2007 by Matt | Posted in Monetization No Comments

How would you like to sell T-Shirts through your website without having to do any of the hard work yourself? With CafePress you simply upload an image, and you’re selling shirts (or other products) in no time at all.

I’ve experimented with CafePress a little in the past, but not too seriously yet. As NorthXEast.com had said months ago, back when it was still the personal blog of Collis Ta’eed, you probably won’t have great results if you’re selling shirts with just your logo on them. Only sites or companies with large mega-fan followings can do that (like Firefox, Apple, Google, maybe ProBlogger). Instead, you want to sell shirts with something funny on them (like at the Freelance Switch store). Would people buy a shirt that just says “FreelanceSwitch.com”? No, but they’d buy shirts that say “Think Outside the Cubicle.”

CafePress has two types of stores; the “free” version, and the “premium” variety. The way the free version works is

  • CafePress says a basic T-Shirt is $8.99
  • You apply your image and mark-up the price to $10.99 to make a $2 profit. If you think people will pay $15, then go ahead and mark it up to that amount.
  • You can only have one variety of each type of product (basic shirt, premium shirt, bumper sticker, etc). You can’t have two versions of the basic shirt with different images.

The premium version, for a monthly fee, removes some of the stupid restrictions and gives you more shop customization choices. Now, if only I could think of something good to put on a shirt…