Introducing the Paid Reader
Our great business idea, the one that would help us become that publisher that we always wanted to be, was called ‘Paid Reader.’ Essentially, we would promote our articles on different platforms, and the readers who were interested in reading what we had to say would find us and read our articles. While reading, the page will also present some ads which they will be free to click on if they find them interesting. This is how we would pay for those readers. Simple. The decision bore fruit. People loved what we had to say, the level of engagement was outstanding, and the average time for every reader to spend on an article was more than 5 minutes!
Thriving on feedback
We did not rest on our laurels, though. Every quarter, we would sit with our partners from Google and ask them how to improve, to which they would reply by providing guidelines every time. Guidelines which we made our priority to apply immediately.
When they said we should be more careful about the readers we bought and make sure that there were no bots involved, we applied the most advanced fraud detection system to 100% of our traffic. We even made sure that none of the ads placed on our websites was remotely fraudulent. We haven’t had to deal with the issue since.
When Google mentioned we should improve the quality of our writing, we hired a top-notch editor, and she really took our writing to a whole new level. We became original, sophisticated, funny, and precise. We also signed with the best stock image companies to allow a huge variety of high-quality images to be used in our articles, and yes, the engagement of our readers jumped to over 6 minutes on average!
When Google said they weren’t happy with the number of ads we have placed on each page, we worked to reduce the amount to a number that they were happy with. Yet again, the engagement of our readers continued to grow and CPMs continued to increase!
When Google brought to our attention that our domain was too slow to load and gave us a tool to measure our domain’s speed, once again, we adapted and now the domain is one of the fastest on the market.
Elevating the business can be simple
Many ad-tech leaders decide that the MFA experience is, by default, not good. They create and support blacklisting for domains in a way that deters advertisers from engaging with them simply because their name is on the no-fly list. Unlike them, Google is actually doing the hard work to make the internet a better place by providing guidelines on how publishers should look and how they can improve. It provides the tools and assistance to help good publishers get better and at the same time stay in business.
Ad-tech leaders who created and supported the MFA idea and blacklisting (which can be used in a great way, by the way), are not willing to do the hard work and guide good publishers out of this MFA list. There is nothing wrong with paid traffic as long as you provide good value for money to the advertiser and at the same time provide a good user experience.
The road to get there is simple. We just have to drive it.