For the average Internet and social media consumer, the main use of such platforms as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are for interacting, entertaining, and just killing time. However a lot of people don’t recognize that these websites are also huge businesses for others as well. Monetization on the Internet, is the process of creating revenue off your own online content. Whether that content is YouTube videos, Facebook fan pages, or sponsored tweets, you have the opportunity in creating revenue through these platforms.
The idea behind monetization over the web is the use of advertisements. If you’ve ever watched a YouTube video and had to sit through a fifteen second ad beforehand, it’s not out of random. The creator has given his or her permission to place advertisements over their content for a cut of the profits in return. The revenue for these advertisements are calculated through a process called CPM (cost-per-thousand) which is the amount of money you’d receive for every thousand hits on your website or video. While the average CPM is around three dollars, a video with about a million hits can receive up to three thousand dollars in revenue. Not bad, right?
While online content creating can be a hard business to break into, its just as rewarding. Create a fan base, maintain their viewership and you to can monetize the Internet. Just think about the fact that there are actual people out there making thousands just by playing around on the Internet, which many do for free.