Subscriptions have been 'the new black' and a mainstay of my income since 2000 or so, but subscriptions do not lend themselves to all kinds of content.
Advertising has always been a way to make otherwise losing propositions profitable, and as long as there are companies marketing products there will be advertising. It would be wasteful not to tap in to those dollars.
As Patio11 elsewhere already pointed out adsense is a form of micropayments, and micropayments are the 'pay-as-you-go' of subscriptions.
The only problem with that is that adsense is not transparent and it doesn't allow you to set your own price. In fact, you don't even know how much your inventory is really worth.
So if your site does not have a very tight coupling between the users and the sites, one that you expect to last for many months or years advertising is actually a very good solution, but adsense in particular may not be the best you can do.
Another problem with adsense is the fact that clickfraud benefits both google and the fraudsters, so for advertisers it is very difficult to track whether they're spending their money correctly or not.
I wished someone would start to give google some serious competition in this space.
Advertising has always been a way to make otherwise losing propositions profitable
Or you could, you know, be the guy paying for the AdWords. I sell a product to consumers over the Internet. Stop the presses, I know. I have many competitors who do free versions essentially the same product, monetized by ads. My ads, since if Google polled the entire world saying "Hey who of you would pay cash money to speak to an elementary school English teacher currently making Reading Rainbow bingo cards?" I'd be up in the front row shouting "OOH OOH PICK ME!"
Since I know what Google charges me and I can estimate what Google keeps, I can ballpark estimate the CPMs for their sites. Its in the $2 a month range. The effective CPM for my site is more than twenty times higher than that.
Ads also have a pernicious effect on your product design. A core skill for B2C products is optimizing them so that the user gets through the workflow successfully. We optimize for success, because successful users pay us money. If you have CPC ads on your site, you have to optimize for failure: the ad has to be more enticing than your application/content or you don't get paid.
Granted, there are some audiences who don't pay money for anything (why hello, students) and some applications whose users will not pay money for them (why hello, URL shorteners/social networkers/anything starting with the letters Tw), but you don't have to make these. There is literally infinite need for solutions to problems, even in B2C (C stands for consumer, i.e., one who buys products), that you could deliver profitably. And then spend a portion of those profits tossing nickels to sites without business sense so you can steal their users and charge them dollars.
> If you have CPC ads on your site, you have to optimize for failure: the ad has to be more enticing than your application/content or you don't get paid.
I've been saying that for years, nobody believes it.
But it is definitely true, if you're a destination site and your clickthrough is lousy then you are in a good spot to do subscriptions. It means your product is better than that ads.
Advertising has always been a way to make otherwise losing propositions profitable, and as long as there are companies marketing products there will be advertising. It would be wasteful not to tap in to those dollars.
As Patio11 elsewhere already pointed out adsense is a form of micropayments, and micropayments are the 'pay-as-you-go' of subscriptions.
The only problem with that is that adsense is not transparent and it doesn't allow you to set your own price. In fact, you don't even know how much your inventory is really worth.
So if your site does not have a very tight coupling between the users and the sites, one that you expect to last for many months or years advertising is actually a very good solution, but adsense in particular may not be the best you can do.
Another problem with adsense is the fact that clickfraud benefits both google and the fraudsters, so for advertisers it is very difficult to track whether they're spending their money correctly or not.
I wished someone would start to give google some serious competition in this space.