This is a really clever thread, and as
@se900se said, it's really an ad arbitrage play with quizzes being the draw.
A few additional nuggets of advice for anyone that reads this thread (on page 16!):
- Facebook / Twitter / Reddit / Pintrest can absolutely drive organic traffic, but you can also play for visits on a CPC basis and can still turn a profit.
- Adsense can work well, but in 2019, you should have a header bidding setup. This lets multiple monetization partners compete against each other for every impression. I've seen publishers implement header bidding have a rise in revenue from 30%-70%. There are companies such as Freestar or Sortable that will do "header bidding as a service" so it won't require any coding know-how on your part.
- At the end of a quiz, you can try letting a user register (by giving an e-mail) so they can see where they are on the leaderboard. Then you can e-mail them any time a new quiz comes around. This will get you more organic traffic.
- Bonus points if there is some way for a quiz viewer to make their own quiz! Then they can send their own quiz around to their friends and you can collect the revenue!
BuzzFeed gets a significant amount of their traffic from fan-made quizzes. Their top quiz maker was / is a college girl that makes quizzes for fun, and several BuzzFeed employees were laid off because this girl was doing their job better than they were, and for free!