Google AdSense, Advertorials, Competitions, Take-overs, ...

There are 101 ways to monetize a website, but I would really love to hear some stories of people managing videogames related online projects how - and if - they earn money with them. What, from your experience, do you find to be the advantages and disadvantages of the different possibilities that are out there? Share alike!

Well, since we are a small site we try to get as many members sticked to the site and to do so we have quite a lot of competitions. For example: right now we have competitions for Modern Warfare 2, Overlord II en OPF: Dragon Rising. Since the MW2-competition came online we have dozens of new people started to check out the site, talking about effectiveness :D

Difficult one this, as the old saying goes you have to speculate to accumilate but quite frankly we don't have anything other than money for hosting & event coverage to pump into the website at the moment. We run competitions to try and encourage forum sign ups and at the moment i'm trying to get our 293 YouTube subscribers to go forward and explore the website aswell. It's not an easy task.

As for generating revenue our method is to do a 30-day advertisement run on any videos we upload within a month. We're just about to pitch that to a few advertisers, those that buy advertising on the videos made in that said month will get permanent advertising on any videos made within that month.

We then feedback the footfall and demographic of users that watch the video back to the clients, the only thing we cannot supply stats for is click-throughs. Whether it'll be a succesful pitch remains a mystery but i'll post back here in a months time and let u know whether we've had any business.

Like Ralph said, we are doing some competitions. When we launched our Call fo Duty: Modern Warfare Hardened Edition competition, we also got some new members on our forums.

For the smaller sites, the number one priority from a business perspective is definitely attracting visitor and obtaining registered and active members. Competitions are a great way to achieve that.

Nevertheless, the bottom line of my question was how do you really monetize your website, meaning how do you earn real money with it - assuming the competitions you mentioned are not paid competitions.

Well, the first source of income I would think of is advertisement. When you grow and grow you might find yourself a funder or something, but from scratch stuff like Google Ads make the first money in the pocket.

Kikizo provided content for AOL, Orange, and Telewest. And Videogamer first got cash when it provided content for NTL/Virgin [am not sure if they still do this now though]. Both now also get display advertising revenue. That's as much as I know. P.S. Kikizo is being rebranded with a new name next month.

Afternoon,
I am the new Account Manager within the video gaming and HD department for Imagine Publishing which is the UK’s fastest growing specialist magazine publisher.

With titles such as X360 (the best selling non official XBOX Magazine in the UK), 360, Play (the biggest selling non official playstation magazine in the UK), Total PC Gaming and Scifi Now magazine we target over 586,000 readers every month. We also publish the icreate magazine, iphone directory and the iphone bookazine.

To back up all our print publications we have dedicated websites for all publications and a new gaming website www.nowgamer.com which combined can accomidate up to 90,000,000 impressions per month. You may think this can be quite expensive but it is extremley cost effective.

I’m currently looking at new trends within the gaming industry and within the titles we publish we have large MMO following and i am now looking to push forward the iphone sector as well.
I would love to have a chat with you about your current products and campaigns and to find out what plans you have for the future. Please contact me via email paul.graham-fielding@imagine-publishing.co.uk or call on 01202586422.

Many Thanks

I have often wondered on what would be the best way to monetise a web site too. Thing is we don't want to have the rubbish google ads on their as Andy (my partner in crime) has morals and hates them. If it was specifically gaming relater then it would be considered, we're independent and speak our mind so that gives us a niche. Also we don't bother with the news cause 3.9 million other sites do so we keep to gaming related editorials and reviews. The only time we do news is if its something a bit different or an interesting subject like the OnLive article.
We have quite a firm following and quite a few writers now working with us, so it would be good to reward them in some way. Its just finding the best way to do it. If Anyone has an idea, input would be appreciated.

What? You mean you don't like the Evony ads?