Making money with a web site

There are two camps when it comes to running a web site for a company; Promotions and Value. The Promotions camp is just interested in selling the brand, the people, the look, all that type stuff. The Value camp represents what the business actually does. Both are important to achieve an overall goal of a successful web site. But one is more important than the other. Guess which one is most important?

I work for a news media outlet and the company’s web site sucks. It’s 84% ads and promotions and 5% of it is valuable news. The other 11%, well…that’s up for debate, let’s call that clutter. The site gets around 1 million hits a month because it has been around a long time and has a built-in user base. Unfortunately, they rest on this user base and then attempt to make money by selling front page banner ads, side ads, click ads…and anything that you can click on to make two cents. Nevertheless they’re making some money.

However, recently it finally hit some people that the internet is cutting into regular profits of TV stations and newspapers. So what do the do? We redesign the web site with new colors and new organization. They still plant ads everywhere and still don’t focus on delivering good news. They’ve done this a several times in the six years I’ve been hanging around there. Do you see the problem yet?

The problem is the Value Camp is getting beat down. I recently wrote a letter to The Man at work after being asked in a meeting to send revenue ideas to The Man. I didn’t have any new ideas for generating revenue, but I told him that actual revenue can be made from a web site if it treated as a content outlet and not as a logo playground.

And while I was reading around some blogs, I came across an article about Google’s strategy to makinng things, web sites included. Amongst the topics discussed, there is one that falls under the “Build integrity in”, which goes on to say:

There is “no such thing as a successful failure; if it is useful to people, later we can make revenue from it in a logical way.

This is exactly what I told The Man…if you focus on content and providing value, money will come on its own. Worry about money last and what you do first - Value over Promotion.

In our case at work, I don’t suggesting removing all ads from the web site is not a bad idea. If that was done, even Stevie Wonder would see that lack of true value in the web site. Traffic is going down because people aren’t getting any value out of the web site.

As a TV station, they’re trying to run their web site like a TV station, and that just doesn’t work. Television works in 30-second video clips and exactly three sentences for any given story of the day. That type of chunking doesn’t translate into a web site. People’s expectations are different online than they are when watching TV. People’s brains, eyes, hands, and interaction is entirely different with a computer than with a television set. They don’t get this, but try to cover it up with advertisements and contents that deliver no value at all.

In contrast, the radio station of which I also work for has a web site that is ALL promotions and contests. But that’s all they claim to provide. They don’t try to provide any “valuable” content on their web site - just ways to win and gimmicks for listening to their station. You can run a web site like a radio station.

I did my duty as a good employee and dropped my lines in the suggestion box. I’ll shit myself if they actually take any action to making the web site better for the public.

It’s easy for businesses to lose sight of what they do when it comes to a web site because a web site is “easy” to run…at least they think so. Just put up some text and ads - people will come and we’ll make money. Yay. And yeah, they come, but it doesn’t matter if they don’t come back. Do you go back to a restaurant that serves you cold meals and has crappy servers? No.

The Value Camp is always more important. Marketing will evolve naturally as people discover your value. And money will come to you if you put your expertise up front.