Earn Money from Ad Space
Ad space sales is what made internet giants like Yahoo, Google, YouTube, and Facebook. It’s the digital version of TV commercials and newspaper ads which are slowly coming to an end, as people spend more time online than watching TV and reading newspapers.
If you can create something that draws a lot of viewers, you have just created something with value. Google had no problem buying YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2005 because it saw its potential as a major revenue source since it was generating a tremendous amount of traffic. Today, YouTube gets about 122 million visitors a day and is worth over $400 billion. It’s main revenue source? Ads. The formula for an ad-selling business is to get traffic, then monetize the traffic with ads.
But generating ad revenue is not only limited to the big guys. The small guy (that’s you!) can participate, too.
Here are ways you can generate income from ad space:
1. Your own YouTube channel – create interesting videos on topics people search for. Once you meet the following, you can monetize your videos with just a click of a box:
- 1,000 subscribers
- 4,000 hours of public watch time within a 12-month period or 10 million public YouTube Shorts views within a 90-day period
Your videos will then show ads, which of course advertisers pay YouTube for, and you get a percentage revenue share which as of this writing is 55%.
Look at other popular video creators in your niche to get ideas on the various approaches that are being used to gain subscribers (serious, humorous, demos, etc.), then do it in your own style.
2. Instagram and TikTok – same concept as YouTube. You need to open a Business profile and have at least 10,000 followers in order to monetize your IG channel, and for TikTok at least 1,000 views in the past 30 days.
3. Insert ad serving code in a highly trafficked website – If you have a website that receives decent trafic, you can join an ad network that sells adspace across the web. And it doesn’t have to be a blog where you keep having to write articles. A smart strategy that is being utilized is creating a “tool/app” or “resource” website such as a calculation website that has many types of calculators, such as mortgage interest, units converters (Celsius to Fahrenheit, for example) and so on. You can hire people to write the code for cheap on sites like Upwork and Fiverr.
Start out by signing up for a Google Adsense account. If you’re accepted, you will be assigned an account number and your unique embed code that you insert in your website. It’s not that difficult to do, you just need to access the code in two places– one in your header, and the other in the specific place on your website where the ad will appear. When you refresh your site, you will see the ads being served. You get paid for every instance the ad is shown to a visitor (doesn’t have to be clicked) so obviously the more traffic you get to your site, the more revenue. Ad networks typically transfer the total amount to your bank account once a month. Getting paid for showing ads on your website properties is another potentially lucrative passive income stream.