8 Things to Remember When Monetizing Content

With online advertising revenues continuing to decline, publishers know they need to do something to generate new income, which has led the industry to put all its focus on reader revenue generation.

We’ve bombarded all the time with new terminology: paywalls, pay gates, memberships, freemium models, dynamic audience segmentation, etc. But they all amount to the same thing: charging readers, one way or another, for your content.

I’m not here to promote one approach over another (anyone who has read my previous columns already knows that I support publishers pursuing user engagement as a means to generate sustainable reader revenue). Whichever approach you take, it is entirely possible to make money with paid content. But to do so, you have to be prepared upfront to commit to the process and to follow certain rules and patterns.

In other words, there is no magic bullet.

Managing…