‘Andrew Chen, blogger extraordinaire, remarks ‘Those who can build audiences and monetize them in the current market will survive’. Understanding source of your traffic and the metric that represents your revenue stream has huge implications on your ability to monetize. There are two broad types of monetization:

• Direct, where you engage a website and pull out your credit card at the end, for e.g. Amazon
• Indirect, where you typically go via intermediary, for e.g. Google,

According to Andrew, there are lessons for both players in direct and indirect monetization world.
Direct monetizers, need to think of user experience as a funnel, where in users are flowing in from different sources. He cautions such companies,for e.g Amazon, to customize user context to address the psychological skew that they may have or face a churn rate. “You can’t have too much Funnel“, he muses. Such companies are well advised to create a dashboard of funnel profitability versus traffic source, to identify avenues for improvement.

Companies with indirect monetization, are in business of corralling as much traffic as they can, so Andrew advises creating a inventory dashboard that gives a view into the value of the inventory being generating from your site.

Finally, Andrew advises that in indirect affiliate or partnership model, helping your partner succeed will go a long way in improving your monetization.

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