How to monetize a ''silly site''?

Alright, hear me out.

So I got a ridiculous, one page meme website made. I knew there was general appeal to this kind of thing. An entertaining and weird appeal.

It's a true shitpost site but people find it funny. I've also found that you can spam this sort of site anywhere around the web and social networks because people will view it as a joke and not spam (very important thing to note!).

Anyways, I was (and still am) an IM noob so I didn't know how to monetize the site. I knew I couldn't get approved with adsense. What I did was I applied to Amazon affiliates with 2 random sites which weren't mine.

It worked for a while. I got tons of visits (my estimate is from 6 figures to 7 figures of visitors). I got 5 digits of clicks on my amazon affiliate link (think it was about 13-15k iirc. Since it was vastly untargeted traffic, I only ended up earning hundreds with amazon and they actually banned my account before the last payout ($300+).

I know, wasted potential. So many visitors but so little money.

I ask any of you for ideas as to how I should monetize this site. I still haven't got adsense and I won't get approved. I wouldn't want to ruin the ''reputation'' of this site with CPA.

Any ideas and suggestion would be excellent.

P.S. yeah the site is kind of in a niche, but it's pretty much a joke niche. Think of it like being a subset of memes, let's say. I don't think there could be any very targeted ads here.

Any ideas?

Visit other joke sites and see how they monetize them.

Ads probably

try some cpm ads like juicyads and/or popups (popads), keep popups to a minimum so it does not harm your user experience let say something like 1/6 hours, from there you can adjust it and see how it goes

You could consider a place like Bidvertiser or PropellerAds. Bidvertiser is similar to Adsense, only not as strict on content..etc. As for PropellerAds, they offer a variety of different monetization options including banners and push notifications where you can get paid per subscriber or on a CPM basis. With your traffic I would think you'd have no problem getting into either of them..

rexstacy said:

try some cpm ads like juicyads and/or popups (popads), keep popups to a minimum so it does not harm your user experience let say something like 1/6 hours, from there you can adjust it and see how it goes

Click to expand...

The problem is there's nothing to click on the website. And popads are annoying as fuck.

mixing said:

You could consider a place like Bidvertiser or PropellerAds. Bidvertiser is similar to Adsense, only not as strict on content..etc. As for PropellerAds, they offer a variety of different monetization options including banners and push notifications where you can get paid per subscriber or on a CPM basis. With your traffic I would think you'd have no problem getting into either of them..

Click to expand...

I keep hearing mixed reviews about propellerads. What would you guess would be the CPM for untargeted traffic for both the cpm and cpc model? Do they display relevant ads like adsense or arbitrary ads?

Try researching some low cost, high margin products you could sell on the site that relate to the memes. Alibaba could be a good option if you want to invest less than $500.

If ads don't work, merch'll do it.

Bommie said:

The problem is there's nothing to click on the website. And popads are annoying as fuck.




I keep hearing mixed reviews about propellerads. What would you guess would be the CPM for untargeted traffic for both the cpm and cpc model? Do they display relevant ads like adsense or arbitrary ads?

Click to expand...

Most of the time they show arbitrary ads you should try them for 1 week or 2 to test them with your traffic, In my tests with them I had higher cpm with traffic from MEXICO and ARGENTINA than I had with Tier 1 countries. After the test then you can send them only the traffic with higher cpm and don't waste all your traffic using geolocation scripts.

EDIT: you can control popads to only 1/day, 1/12 hours so they will not be intrusive at all, as for the part where there is nothing to click on the site you can always implement a little javascript to click anywhere on the page to trigger the popup once the page is fully loaded or after X seconds.

I'm using propellerads for one of my site with 40% US traffic, 40% India.
CPM for noti subscription is $0.75, for interstitial (a kind of annoying pop-up ad) is $14.
The traffic is somewhat untargeted aswell.

I think you still need to try sign up for AdSense or if you want to take a little risk you can buy old aged AdSense account and add your site on this account. If you really got a lot of visitor and your content not violated any copyright you still got a chance that your site will be approved by AdSense.

if your site only have a meme you should write something under that meme ( about your site, about that meme, idea for meme etc ), you also need to create privacy policy page, dmca page (use some template on Google) and remove any ads especially popups before sign up/add new sites.

Last month I just add new sites to my AdSense account and it's only a single page audio/video downloader from some karaoke apps, 4 month old domain and only got less than 100 unique visitor/day, and AdSense still approved my website in 3 days.

If you want to try popups, you can add a cookie notification code on your sites so your visitor will click on accept/close button and trigger the popups code. Note, you can't use AdSense with popups at same site.

A few things you could try:

Use your traffic to grow instagram meme accounts, then sell the accounts or shout outs
Produce meme products or merch (cups, shirts, etc.)
Contact companies who are making meme products and ask them if they'd like to advertise
Setup some sort of drop shipping site that has products that your demo might like and advertise them

Some combination of all of these

hardgamers said:

I think you still need to try sign up for AdSense or if you want to take a little risk you can buy old aged AdSense account and add your site on this account. If you really got a lot of visitor and your content not violated any copyright you still got a chance that your site will be approved by AdSense.

if your site only have a meme you should write something under that meme ( about your site, about that meme, idea for meme etc ), you also need to create privacy policy page, dmca page (use some template on Google) and remove any ads especially popups before sign up/add new sites.

Last month I just add new sites to my AdSense account and it's only a single page audio/video downloader from some karaoke apps, 4 month old domain and only got less than 100 unique visitor/day, and AdSense still approved my website in 3 days.

If you want to try popups, you can add a cookie notification code on your sites so your visitor will click on accept/close button and trigger the popups code. Note, you can't use AdSense with popups at same site.

Click to expand...

Oh yeah, do those bought adsense accounts work? You buy them, then change all of your info, including your name? Does that really work? I've been suspicious of that.

As for the site, it's literally flashing gifs and pure shitpost. ''About the meme'' and stuff would be overkill. Imagine if goatse.cx had any of that (mine is higher quality than goatse and is funny, rather than shocking) but it's an ample comparison I guess.

Grayback said:

I'm using propellerads for one of my site with 40% US traffic, 40% India.
CPM for noti subscription is $0.75, for interstitial (a kind of annoying pop-up ad) is $14.
The traffic is somewhat untargeted aswell.

Click to expand...

The $0.75 doesn't sound really good, but the interstitial ads have an insane cpm. Do they really work? Do people leave your site in mass?

My site has some "incentive" elements so people don't mind some pop-up. It definitely won't work that well for sites of which content can easily be found else where.
The interstitial is less annoying than pop-up ads but it will still piss off some users.