Can Pay-Per-Post Actually Work?

Hi Guys,

It's good to be on the Digital Point Forum with you all. I'm new here, and I came with a question I hope some of the experienced marketers here could possibly help me with.

Is a pay-per-post blogging model actually effective?

I'm looking at implementing a small fee for about every 1 in 5 posts on my site. This post would be a very detailed article and would also include an instructional video. The fee for these posts would likely be $2 - $5 to unlock the full article.

Now you might be thinking, "who is going to pull out their credit card for a $2 article"? And generally I would agree this is silly (or not possible), but my niche is in the bitcoin industry and digital currencies make small payments such as this very feasible. Actually, with the integration I have currently, making a payment with bitcoin is very straight forward and quick.

What I am wondering is if any of the marketers here have experience with the pay-per-post model of monetization. Can something like this work? What are the downsides? Should I instead try some other model?

Any advice is appreciated as I am currently experimenting with ways to monetize my site.

 

I personally doubt it. You'd probably have more luck monetizing it with AdSense or something similar. I don't know if you happened to see sites where articles are divided into small / medium size paragraphs with "Read next paragraph" underneath. Then they have two AdSense ads above and below each paragraph. Let's say your article has 7 paragraphs, so the visitor will have to click the "Read next paragraph" button at least 6 times to get to the end of it, thus viewing various ads and hopefully clicking on one of them.

Have you considered charging for posting articles on your blog? If it's a busy blog you'll have bitcoiners interested in promoting their own gigs on it. You can enforce a few things like: their posts must be original, educational in nature and not spammy (allowing 1 link per article) and then charging $10-$15 for each article posted on your blog.

 

I don't think anyone would be interested enough to pay to read a full article, even with your niche. I agree with qwikad, you should just monetize them using adsense or with some other advertising agency.

 

I think it might work but by paying in bitcoin they would need to pay a fee in order to make a payment come to instantly, I don't know how much in $ is a fee for instant refresh in bitcoin but it might eat half of your profit. But the best is to try because bitcoin community would appreciate that you accept payments and I think they would use a chance to make a payment to experiene what is to buy using bitcoin. There is no harm, if it would not be as profitable you can always return to advertisement monetization model. If you make first half of your post visible and the rest pay-to-read it would increase convertion because it will be a teaser and people would know that it is not a fraud.

 

Charging for posting articles on our blog is something I never considered. Is this a well known and effective model? I wonder how much traffic there would need to be to convince potential buyers that our niche is worth it?

 

The fee for bitcoin payments is quite negligible. It wouldn't eat into the profits hardly because I believe the current fee we are working with is 1%. On a $2 article that is $0.02.

I think your advice on trying it out for experimentation purposes is spot on. Why not give it a solid try and see what happens? If it proves not to work, we can always go back to a different model.

 

This is quiet an old model but it is still effective if and only if you have considerably good articles or topics. In my experience simply posting your thoughts or even some learning material does not grab you paying customers. For every post you make there are thousands of them in Youtube or other media outlets. I believe other types of commercialization would suite you better such as Adsense or click through advertising. One last thing is do not get excited about making money to fill up your page with ads and forget about the content, it is the content that people come to see not the ads, if a good ratio of ads to content is not there then you will lose the most valuable thing; your audience.
Good luck