If you open your website analytics service and view the stats for the usage of mobile devices by visitors of your forums, you may be surprised. Mobile is growing – a trend that will only continue. The main question that you can ask yourself is: how can I embrace it?
While it is likely that your visitors can view your website in their mobile browsers, that experience may not be an ideal or enjoyable one if you don’t offer some form of mobile site. The version of your website designed for desktops and laptops normally won’t work as well on mobile phone screens.
This is an ebook about monetization, so mobile design and development is outside of our scope. Instead, we’ll be discussing how you can monetize your mobile experience.
In order to work with monetization methods that are optimized for mobile, you must actually offer a mobile experience.
There are three main ways to accomplish this. First, you can offer a mobile version of your forums that visitors with mobile devices are directed to. Second, you can release applications for specific mobile operating systems. Primarily, these are Apple’s iOS, which is what the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch all run, and the Google led Android. Others platforms do exist and, if you find your audience using one of them, they may also be worthwhile. Third, your forums can be built using responsive design, an emerging trend popularized by Ethan Marcotte, where your design gracefully adjusts for a web visitor based on the device they are using and their browsing capabilities, including the size of their screen.
If you go down the application route, you can potentially charge for the apps themselves. If all the app does is provide a way of accessing forum content, though, it is more common for it to be free and for monetization to appear in the form of advertising or affiliate programs, which we will discuss shortly. If you bundle additional services and features with the app, which are unique to the app, it may create a greater opportunity to charge for it. You could also provide a free app that allows you to fully access the forums but then offer paid extras that add additional, valuable functionality.
Tapatalk and Forum Runner are popular paid mobile forum apps. They act as a sort of forum directory, partnering with forums and making them accessible via their respective applications. Neither compensates forum owners for app sales, but they do allow for the integration of your own advertisements when your forums are being viewed through their apps. When people go to download the app, it is not your app, it is the Tapatalk or Forum Runner app.
To go deeper and have more control, including the ability to brand your app and offer it for free, you will want to develop your own application. Both Tapatalk and Forum Runner offer white label services and custom development and you can, of course, work with your own mobile developer to create a custom app as well. When you build your own app, you will also be responsible for the maintenance of it, as the mobile platforms change and update, which means additional development costs.
Just as you can sell display ads on the desktop version of your forums, so can you on the mobile version or within your mobile application. We discussed advertisement sales in detail in the Display Advertising section of this book and most of the key principles and details mentioned in that chapter also apply to mobile advertisements.
Just as with the desktop version of your community, you can sell your own ads directly through your own ad server or you can work with advertising networks, which sell mobile ads for you and others and take a portion of the sale, but handle much of the logistics.
There are many mobile advertising networks out there – some work with mobile friendly websites and content, some with mobile apps specifically and some with both. These include Google AdSense, Apple’s iAd Network, Jumptap, Millennial Media, Mobile Theory, madvertise, BuzzCity, Adfonic, InMobi, NAVTEQ Media Solutions and more. Smaato is a mobile ad optimization platform that hooks in with multiple networks and attempts to serve the most profitable advertisements available to you.
Experimentation will lead you to the best results. Work with different networks to see who offers you the best rates and, if you are able, try to sell your own direct, premium ads, which will allow you to keep more of the profit.
For the ins and outs of affiliate programs, please see the Affiliate Programs and CPA Networks chapter earlier in this book. It contains the important ideas and concepts that you will need to know to get the most out of this form of monetization.
There is one big thing that you need to know when it comes to your mobile visitors and transactions that may qualify for affiliate commissions: many affiliate programs will not pay you for mobile transactions. In other words, if you plan to utilize affiliate programs as part of your mobile experience, you should pay close attention to the terms and conditions tied to any program that you consider. You will want to make sure that they will actually compensate you for transactions made through mobile devices and applications.
Skimlinks and VigLink, the primary players in the automatic affiliatization space, can both work well with mobile. But, they are limited to the program’s qualifications, as well. If the link goes to a store whose program does not support mobile transactions, you will not earn anything.
As mobile continues to grow, so will the creative ideas for monetization. From what we’ve discussed here, you can see that what happens on the desktop isn’t all that dissimilar from what happens on mobile devices. Perhaps the partners and vendors change, but the ideas and the strategy can share a lot in common.