Thoughts on monetizing a meme site

Maybe some amazon items. Memes get a wide variety of people attracted to them but they're usually in the 20's and younger I would imagine. So probably items that the college age would purchase. You could even make some memes about some products.

definitely merchandise!
Get cafepress and put memes on everything!!!!

ppl will buy.


...especially politically humorous ones...

Hey Thrasher66099,

I saw this article and thought it might be some help to you. Cash In on Internet Memes | PCWorld Business Center

I think a lot of other meme sites are using advertisements and selling t-shirts and books. You should try to get some stats on your audience and its demographic, then tailor the ads you put up towards that market. Possibly things like Netflix and other sites that have affiliate programs.

Also, it might be a bit too expensive at the moment, but if you start to generate enough revenue in the future why not consider having an iPhone app developed for your audience. Like meme creator and advertise it on your site for sale. Just another suggestion.

Hope it helps,

Jamie

As someone who frequents Funnyjunk - Funny Pictures, Funny Videos and other Funny stuff (a huge humor/meme site) I'll have to say DON'T rush it. Let your traffic grow and get a following before monetizing it. Once you have the following, you won't have trouble selling merchandise you put in front of them if they associate with your site as it grows in popularity. If you try to push "premium" or merchandise for an unknown brand too early people will probably just go off to other sites that are already established/not trying to sell to them.

The site I linked in the beginning is a good one to check out for ideas on an effective model for a larger, community driven humor site.

Merchandise connected with the site theme makes the most sense to me.

I was once involved with a T-shirt site and we were given the very good advice by our online printing service that there's a sharp drop off in orders when shirts are priced over $8.

That was such great advice and we were so inexperienced in t-shirts that naturally we ignored his advice and failed dismally

But that's another story for another time. Great work on getting that amount of traffic so quickly.

Also, I realize that my earlier link was broken up if anyone would like to check the site out and tell me specifically what you like or don't like about it that would be great.

Here is a working link:

EDIT: Bleh it's still not working. This forum's profanity filter is causing the first word to turn into asterisks even as a url. DOH!

Spell out the URL, we'll figure it out. I'm interested in seeing the site.

T Shirts and Stickers will probably be your best bet.

Here's what you you do: have a monthly contest for the best meme. This will be voted on by the other users. Then, the winner gets a free shirt/sticker/whatever. Contests, and more importantly, voting on user's submissions will keep people coming back.

What's a meme site?

------->Newbie <---------

A meme site will be hard to monetize , and you just started so dont even rush it , first you have to have people who love the website , not people who is just checking it out , you have to make a community and btw try to be more original the theme kinda looks like 9gag , dont think that visitors who go on these kind of websites want another 9gag , try something new , i made something like your website about 2 months + ago and i curently have 6k+ visitors a day , i just have adsense up ... just to be there really , theres no money in for me , for this kind of audience you really need more than 10.000 daily , probably tens of thousands before you can call it a success , and if its not going viral in few months try joining a funny blog network that will probably add more traffic to your website but probably have to split the revenue , if you have a website like this with lots of daily traffic would be easy , but seems that since there are thousands of websites who is doing the same thing there is not a good chance to make money , the audience is really low , mostly people with no money , school ,jobs, children , family , so really .. no money to spend , thats why it will always be hard to make money out of it . good luck

I covered the whole thing for emphasis

No you are not rude , i was only saying that is hard to monetize a site like this without thousands of visitors that constantly use your website , my first couple of days were good , just like yours , in my first month my busiest day had 20 k visitors ( only made few bucks with adsense )
My question for you , where do you get your stats from ? wordpress , cpanel or google analytics ?
were do you get your traffic from ? facebook , reddit , stumbleupon , twitter ?
couse 2k visitors its nothing if its traffic from reddit lets say , from my experience.
its bad quality traffic , they come and bounce right away , useless , they only use your bandwith and you dont make any money .
So you have to consider that too , whats the point in having 100 k visitors if they will only make you pay more to the hosting company and you wont make any revenue from it?
Best traffic for me and really and good increase in facebook likes on my page was from google .
Of course even traffic from sites like stumbleupon are good to increase popularity and if you have good content maybe they will stick arround and check your site more often .

We ended up getting 1415 visitors yesterday if anyone cares. Currently we are trying to get a userbase through our fanpage and our own personal pages.

Anyone have any ideas for other ways we can expand promotion through nonpaid methods?

Brilliant site. I really liked it. Hope you DO succeed with it. I like the cafepress idea

We had over 2800 visitors yesterday and today is on pace to break well over 4k. Sadly adsense is doing horrendous. We're getting a ctr of 0.03% and our rpm is about 18 cents.

I'm thinking I've got to get a bit more creative here or in a few weeks I'm going to have to pay higher hosting fees and adsense won't be able to keep up with that baseline.

I really think that amazon would be a good fix but because I'm in illinois it's not going to work. People are starting to organically post on facebook about us but we still don't have brand recognition (duh) so I don't think physical branded products would be a good idea yet.

Does anyone have any other possible alternatives? I'm thinking about trying to post some buy.com ads about jewelry since about 57% of our facebook visitors are women between the ages of 18 and 30.

Please send me a sample.