Live from Minday – Creating Community

I’m here at the Minday Summit in New York with a packed room listening to a panel speaking on community development. This is obviously a hot topic for any publisher today. All of the speakers talk about the cool community features they’ve been developing (and many of them are indeed cool). But in both this session and other sessions I’ve heard on the subject, there isn’t much discussion about the revenue side and how to monetize online communities.

The big win, of course, is generating large traffic volumes. Gus Venditto with Jupitermedia is on the panel and said that of the 15M or so page views per month, approx half of them are generated from forums. 7.5M page views is an astounding number, but I’ve personally seen and experienced some interesting dynamics in monetizing this kind of traffic.

Most content-based sites generate approx 3-5 page views per visit (I’m not including database site like Globalspec, Expedia, or Bitpipe). In contrast, in is not atypical for forum site to generate 20-30 page views per visit.

Wow! Think about all the advertising inventory there is to sell. Two problems, however. First, just because you have 10 times the inventory, doesn’t mean that you are reaching 10x the people. You are simply hitting the same people more time. Second, I typically see that CTRs for advertiser are about 5-8x less than on a normal content site.

These are not necessarily bad metrics, but something to consider when pricing and packaging online communities for your advertisers. Online community is good, but it’s not a silver bullet.