In business administration, monetization is the process that results in a financial benefit being achieved with an idea, a product or a service. For founders of startups, monetization plays an important role because it shows whether money can actually be made with the business idea. There are various business models on the World Wide Web to generate income from websites, for example with an online shop or as an affiliate.
Background
The commercial Internet has evolved steadily since the late 1990s. In line with this development, the business models for monetization via the World Wide Web have also expanded.
Entrepreneurs today can take advantage of many different opportunities to earn money with their business idea via the Internet. The enormous further development is based on the one hand on the evolution of the payment systems and on the other hand on the increasing importance of the mobile Internet. An important milestone for monetization was the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and the subsequent expansion of the mobile phone network. Mobile Internet traffic now accounts for over 60% of all Internet traffic.
Business models
There are different ways to monetize an idea, a product or a website:
- Displaying advertising on your own website: A very simple method of monetizing your own website is to include advertising banners. For example, webmasters can participate in advertising programs such as Google Adsense. In this case, the advertisers receive money from the advertising platform for each click on a displayed advertising material or depending on a certain number of impressions.
- Participation in affiliate programs: In this case, website operators can include selected advertising material or links on their website that lead to a commercial website. If the user buys a product there or if he generally performs an action defined within the framework of the affiliate program, the “affiliate” receives remuneration.
- Online shop: If you want to sell your own products or want to offer other products on the Internet as part of your business idea, you can start an online shop. This form of monetization is similar to a physical store, except that the store is purely virtual. However, some traders also pursue a double strategy for monetization with stationary and web-based trade.
- Embedding advertising in your own YouTube channel: If you use your own YouTube channel, you can embed advertising videos in your own videos there. However, certain criteria must be met for videos to be monetized.
- Paid content: Magazines and newspapers in particular work with the variant of paid content in order to monetize their content independently of advertisements. Users then have to pay money to read articles. In addition to subscription models, there are also payment models for individual retrieval.
Limits
Monetization on the web reaches its limits when websites do not identify paid content as such. For example, so-called sponsored links must be marked. At the same time, it is advisable to add the rel=nofollow attribute so that Google does not interpret this link as web spam.
In addition, many influencers who test and recommend products on Instagram or other social media channels are suspected of “surreptitious advertising”. The same applies to product testers on YouTube who publish their own videos there.