fatinfo.com

After visiting many directories, what is the one most common element you come across in all of these directories? AdSense. However, it seems the more established directories DO NOT use AdSense. I think in some ways new directory owners are misguided that AdSense is a revenue generator because it is easy to implement with the promise of endless revenue. Then they go overboard with placing too much AdSense into their design making it less user friendly than it has to be.

Let’s try to understand who are these people visiting directories. The answer is mainly webmasters and search engine marketing individuals. They are trained to simply NOT click on any AdSense ads because by clicking on the ad, it will take them away from their target goal of making a directory submission for the sites they are promoting. At least that’s how I am. The click-through rates are actually abysmal for directories where you need at least 10,000 page views to make like $10 per day. As you can already guess, FatInfo makes absolutely no money from AdSense unless you are as popular as PodcastDirectory generating close to 40k per year according to a recent Washington Post article.

Some discussions have suggested to sell featured ads to webmasters, or advertise tools for webmasters. I have spent some time analyzing one particular directory with no adsense (which is not mine) targetting webmasters where ad spots are sold on a monthly subscription basis through PayPal. If all the ad spots were sold, the directory would bring in $750+ per month. Right now the spots are about 65% sold. I mean that’s easy money on a monthly basis for developing a good tool with PHP and mySQL that people can use with almost zero maintenance.

FatInfo.com does not have that luxury because it is not much of a tool besides an organized directory with an okay pagerank. I thought about selling a monthly listing on the front page, but I am going to wait until the site can go up to a PR 6 first. I am not too concerned about making money with this site as it is more of a toy to learn some basic css, php and directory marketing than anything else. Whichever way you choose to monetize a directory, increasing the number of unique visitors is the key to the dollars.