GrowLetter and Ezoic - Newsletter Monetization Strategies

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Matt, and I'm here with Gavin Bechtold

who is one of the head of enterprise partnerships at Ezoic. And we wanted to talk today all about

website traffic and monetization, something that I think is really overlooked and underutilized

A lot of people who have a social audience, a newsletter audience, have a lot more website

traffic than they realize, especially since AI and in the past five to 10 years, a lot of people

are just overlooking the opportunity they have with websites, with the website traffic they're

getting already. I certainly am. That's why I wanted to talk to Gavin about how to monetize

that audience that we have from web traffic. So Gavin, can you give me like a quick overview of

your role at Ezoic, what the company does and what you do? Yeah, sure. So I work directly with

Ezoic's largest clients and with our external business partners like you. And also great to

be here, by the way. Love being able to educate people here more on the value of a multi-channel

world, right? What we're talking about today is diversifying into a web audience. Ezoic

what we primarily do is we work with media operators. And I know that term is interchangeable

right? So we have publishers, which is historically what Ezoic has worked with

people who focused on content sites. But today it's people who have video, who have newsletters

And Ezoic works with those folks to monetize their digital business with programmatic ads

And what are some of, you know, I kind of discovered you through some of my clients that work with you, people that I know that work with you, like Matt Paulson, who has MarketBeat

They have 6 million newsletter subscribers, maybe 10 plus, 15 million plus website visitors per month

What types of, and there's a lot of different types of businesses that use Ezoic, but what are maybe some clients that you can share that you've worked with and had success with

Yeah, so I think in terms of the types of sites that we work with, we work with a very broad range of digital businesses

Content sites are kind of the traditional one, But we've expanded a lot into digital businesses like SaaS, e-commerce, and even web apps

So like tools, calculators, things like that, where people are engaged with that application and they want a way to monetize it

But yeah, you mentioned MarketBeat is a client that your audience will be familiar with, who will also be at the upcoming New Media Summit is 6am City

Outside of that, some notable names would be like Guinness Book of World Records is another site and the LPGA

LPGA. So it's a woman's golf. Cool. Yeah. And so we'll talk mostly about content businesses

but like if you have website track of any type, whether you're a gaming website, calculator

speed testing, whatever it might be, a lot of those sites use Ezoic too. Let's get into the

main topic. To get into that, I want to cover some myths, but I want to just kind of lay the

groundwork first. A lot of people who listen to this are newsletter first or newsletter focused

why should they care about website as a revenue channel? Yeah, that's a great question

So if you go back like five to 10 years, this was an era when you might've heard the term niche sites

People who were niche site operators, they would grow a site pretty quickly

and they could rank on Google. This was before LLMs and things like that

and get traffic rather easily. And what this created was a lot of creators

creating a broad range of websites, some of them low value, and it was really a race for ad dollars

So what ended up happening was they would put a lot of ads on these sites, making them not the best for the user experience

And what this kind of led to overall is really a race to the bottom

But when you shift to today, you see with LLMs and AI overviews dominating Google, really the big brands are at the top

And when you look at those sites, you'll see a more thoughtful or curated ad experience

Yeah, I haven't thought about niche sites in a while, but I mean, that was big

And I used to see a lot more of those in Google search results on every topic from gardening to business stuff to more

And like a lot of them didn't really build strong brands or great content

And they packed with ads and they packed things with affiliate links. And it would be like one person or one company operating, you know, dozens of these websites

Yeah, it's like the, have you ever been to one of those, those recipe sites

Those are probably the best example when you're at home trying to cook something and read that recipe and you have a pop up that that obstructs the recipe and the instructions to get that done

Yeah, that's a classic example. But a lot of people are doing something much, much different than that, especially a lot of these clients

And we'll get into that in a second. Do you want to get into why should they care about their website, care about that as a revenue channel

Yeah, definitely. It's funny because media operators used to be kind of website first, but it's shifted today where they're becoming more newsletter first. But I think one of the things that people forget about websites is a website builds trust. If I subscribe to a newsletter, how many times do you buy something directly within that newsletter

I know it definitely happens, but oftentimes I feel like I want to click a link in that email to go to the authoritative site to build some trust, to build some credibility, perhaps read some reviews if you're selling a service or a product

And I want to do that before I buy that. So I think a website builds trust

It helps defend against competition. And then it also introduces new revenue sources

Yeah, I really do think and I'm guilty of this, that people have just because email is a trend right now and a trend for a good reason

They've overlooked their website in many ways, not including just like ad revenue, but just like lacking about pages, review pages, case studies, like everything

They don't realize people like the one before they buy something, like they said, they go to the landing page, but they're also going to go to your homepage, click around, look at every page

They're going to search you on Google, you know, look at reviews, look at other stuff about the service before they make the transaction, the purchase decision

Okay. What can you do with a website that you simply just can't do with a newsletter

Yeah, it's a good question. So with the website and a newsletter, I think you can do a lot of

similar things, right? They have similar monetization models. You can do direct

sponsors in both newsletter and website. You can sell a product, you can sell a course

you can sell something with an affiliate link, but there hasn't really been an effective

programmatic solution in newsletters. What you can do is if you're driving traffic or if you're

driving users from your newsletter to your website. That gives you the opportunity to add that display ad or programmatic revenue on top of that

Yeah, that's that's a good point. A lot of people don't realize that about newsletters. The more advanced people here to do realize that

But like there's not a Ezoic or a Google AdSense or a YouTube ad network for email that you

can almost automatically monetize, which is a really special thing that you can do with

websites and maybe one or two other things. That's about it. That doesn't really exist in email

You have to sell something, your own product through email, or you have to sell direct sold ads, which is really challenging for a lot of reasons and not even a great business model for everybody

And websites have that. Another thing I forgot to mention about why a website's important that we didn't cover from the previous topic was that if someone's reading your newsletter content on a regular basis, they want to have like a go-to place to look at all of your content, your previous content, newsletters they've read before, content they forgot about

And if you don't have a great website experience and blog and content experience to do that, you're missing out on people building a deeper relationship with you and also you monetizing them more

I overlook this a lot. That's why I'm talking to you. But like even just by publishing my newsletters as blog posts, we're still getting a meaningful amount of traffic just by whether it's from the newsletter

So I not even clicking like the view online link at the very top of the newsletter or just searching it and like reading the content there because the inbox is not a good place for that Like people will read a newsletter when they receive it they archiving it but they not revisiting content or going back to old content

in email. They do that on your website. Yeah, no, it's a good point. And I think

one of the things that newsletter operators can do is they can think about intentionally driving

visitors in their newsletter to their website because I think that's something else that

oftentimes is overlooked. And they're really simple, like a read more button. You can do a

roundup of stories and they can all link back to your website. And that's something that's going to

get more eyeballs on your site. And then again, it gives you that opportunity to monetize

those users who visit your site. But it really increases the lifetime value of users because

you're opening up a new monetization channel that didn't exist previously. Yeah. Why don't we, we'll come back to the lifetime. Well, actually, let's do that now

Let's address that now, because this is a really interesting thing you talked to me about earlier. How does having a well-monetized website affect the lifetime value of a newsletter subscriber

Yeah, so it does it in a couple of ways. We touched on it a little bit already, but kind of about building that trust and that credibility

So someone's going to buy something from you and your programmatic ads aside, if you have a service or a course or something like that, people want to read more about it

And that can help improve conversions for you. But then the second thing that it does is you can also serve programmatic ads alongside your content or in unobtrusive locations on the site

And what that allows is you can earn a certain value or a certain in our business is called RPM

So it's revenue per per thousand page views. Depending upon how much traffic you're getting to your site, those figures can be very meaningful

And then you can use that to increase the lifetime value of a subscriber, reinvest it back into your business, do a bunch of different meaningful things with that money

Yeah. And that becomes really impactful, especially as your audience grows. And we'll talk about, you know, RPMs and maybe exact like a ballpark of what people could earn later

If you're even just getting 1% of your newsletter opens to your website and just excluding like any products that you have or services that you sell

And we're just talking about, you know, sponsorship and ad monetization. you have ads in the newsletter to monetize that subscriber and when they click and go to your

website you have programmatic ads there to monetize them too so you're kind of getting

this double whammy that can increase the subscriber LTV a lot and I haven't really

heard that talked about so I'm glad we covered it here what type of you know revenue opportunity

do you think people are leaving on the table by just not having any website monetization in place

just not investing time into this yeah it's it's pretty massive actually and I have a couple good

examples that I think kind of help illustrate this. So there are two large businesses. The

first one being Duolingo. Duolingo is the modern language learning platform. They have a website

they have a web app. And I was looking at their financials and about 8% of their revenue is from

ad revenue. That percentage may sound small, but this business does $750 million a year

So when you break that down to 8% of revenue being from ads, actually $60 million per year

Same thing with with Netflix. Netflix does about one point five billion dollars a year from from advertising alone. And that's only about three to four percent of their business, which is a forty two billion dollar a year business. If that helps conceptualize it, you know, we work with multiple million dollar a year businesses. You can end up making six figures per month or per year from programmatic ad revenue alone

Yeah. And Matt Paulson, he shared these numbers before, but I fortunately forget them. He's largely a business that they sell things via email, kind of performance marketing type things, and they'll sell these paid newsletters and get commissions on them. They also have their own subscription business, kind of like a Duolingo or Netflix, but in a very different category. But even then, still, a large chunk of his revenue, and no, it's not like 50%, but it's a meaningful chunk, comes from website programmatic

Like it's a very high margin revenue that doesn't require a lot of team time or resources from a business owner's perspective, right

It's like you set this up, you work with a Zoic or whoever you might work with, and like you're not delivering a product or service

There's not really cost of goods sold or if they are, that's very little. It's almost automatic revenue

Yeah, you're exactly right. Programmatic ads are bought and sold automatically. So the advertisers bid on it in real time and then you get paid out

It's really low lift where even if you're doing direct sponsorships, like if you're selling an ad in your newsletter or on your website, maybe you're a local newsletter or local news site

You work with a lot of local businesses, but that requires you as the individual or maybe you have a sales team or a sales rep that is going out there and trying to secure those deals

So that comes with time, that comes with expenses. There's a lot of overhead there, but programmatic is, as you mentioned, automatic and kind of just hums along in the background

Yeah. And that's what's so cool about it. It's like for a lot of people, it's not going to be 50% of their revenue, but adding 2%, 5%, 10% of revenue that didn't exist before and it's automatic is a huge impact on your business. And it could be more for some people

I want to get into like our myth busting portion of this. Is there anything people should understand before we get into that? Like we're going to talk about first party data. We might want to define that. I think people understand what programmatic ads are. We talked about the difference between Jerexel, which is like you doing all the manual service work and programmatic is automatic

Yeah, I think one term that would be important to define before we dive into that is first party data. And I think this is really relevant, especially for your audience who are a lot of newsletter operators. So first party data is basically any data that is identifiable. So that's things like an email, which you already gather from your newsletter list. It is a phone number, which you might be gathering if you're doing anything with an SMS list. And then basic things like a name, but email and phone number at there. And there is what it is in its simplest form

And identified users are really important in our space because they produce about two to three times more revenue from programmatic from a non-identified user

And non-identified user would be someone arriving from Google search or even an LLM or social

So that's a pretty big difference. And the reason that advertisers pay more is because this data is what we call it's deterministic, meaning the advertiser knows more about that user and they're willing to pay a premium for that

Yeah, that's an important thing to know. It's like if you have this first party data, which most people here have an email list, at least some people have phone numbers, too

You can make more money from programmatic ads for the reasons that we'll get into later. We won't explain all that now

But yeah, I didn't know about this until about a year or so ago when you and your team told me

It's really powerful. And then one final thing I want to mention, and it's hard to get like exact numbers on this because it really varies a lot by industry and site, is like RPMs

Like what should people expect? And it's going to be different if you're like a gardening site versus a financial news site

It's going to be different based off of how many ads you choose to place on your pages

But like if someone has no, like they've never done programmatic ads before on their site, what type of RPM should they expect

Yeah, we get that question all the time. But the truth is, it's really difficult to answer because of all those factors that you mentioned. The audience and the demographics play into that a ton, like what location they're coming from. Are they from the U.S.? Are they from India? Ultimately, how many ads do you want to have on the page? And then do you have any of that first party data available

And then another factor is how engaged are the users on your site? Are they spending minutes reading about a topic or are they just getting something quick

and leaving? So the RPMs can vary very broadly We seen them as high as but more of an average would probably be like in the to range That higher than I think a lot of people think and that I thought too

With that RPM, is that that's inclusive of multiple ads on a page, right

I'm assuming you wouldn't get a $40 or $50 RPM if you just have one ad on a page

You might need two, three, etc. Yeah, you would need more than one in most cases

I would say three is like a good benchmark to start with, especially if you haven't had ads on your site before

There's different formats that you can also use. There's video. You may have seen some of the, they call them anchor units, but it's kind of like an adhesion unit that sticks to the bottom of the page and those perform really well

Yeah, I think a lot of people have seen those, kind of like a sticky bottom ad that can be minimized to

The reason I mention that is because I don't want people to think, hey, if I put like one little ad in the corner of my website where no one can see it, I'm going to make $40 or $50 per 1,000 visitors

Like you need to have a smart strategy. And that's one of the things you help people do is like where to place ads, how many to have, how to maximize user experience and revenue at the same time

And maybe we'll get into some of that. But it's a lot. I mean, a lot of people are kind of lucky to sell a direct sold ad in their newsletter at a $40 or $50 RPM or CPM

Sometimes in the newsletter, we'll use the term CPM, even though RPMs more accurate

even for email. Not to mention like that's direct sold. You had to like close the person

If you have a salesperson, you got to give them a commission. You have to write the copy. You have to share a report with the advertiser

There's so much more work involved. What I'm trying to say is the RPMs on web traffic are a lot higher than people realize

depending on the type of audience engagement and industry that you're in. Anyways, let's get into the myth busting part

Because my objective was this with this is like, I have all these misconceptions about

website traffic and monetization. I know a lot of people do too that I talk to. So let's try and

bust some of these myths that people had. And the first is kind of what we were talking about, which is like everybody worries that ads are going to like clutter my website, hurt my user

experience. My visitors are going to leave and never come back because I have an ad on my website

or my blog. Can you kind of address that worry? Yeah, absolutely. It all comes down to control

at the end of the day, because you as the operator of your site, you can control the ad experience

And I think a better way to think about it is bad ad strategy is cluttered, but ads aren't cluttered themselves

And ads don't have to dominate the experience. They can be designed to respect it

You can blend it in with the content. You can also show ads to free users versus paid users

So that's something that I think your audience may not realize. If you have a paid or premium subscriber channel, you don't have to show ads to them

So it's not like you have to show ads to all types of users. But at the end of the day, I think most audiences aren't anti-ads

They are anti-bad experiences. Yeah, like disruptive ads that block a reading experience, especially on mobile, right

But like when you talk to people who have this concern, is there anything like you recommend

Like assuming they have a typical content, you know, blog style, article style site, like what types of ad formats to use

How many ads per page to start with? Just any like general best practices that you tell people when they're getting started

One of the things that we look at is something called ad density. And what this does, it measures and it balances the ads on the page with the content. So you want to achieve an ad density that isn't obstructive to the viewing experience. And we actually have tons of cases where the ad density goes down when they begin using Ezoic and they actually make more ad revenue. And that example is if they were coming over from another ad network. Obviously, if you're coming over and you haven't used any ads at all, it's all going to be a net positive

Yeah, that's interesting. One related to that question is people are worried ads aren't relevant to their audience. Like they think people are going to get sort of like random irrelevant ads to their readers or maybe even stuff that's like adult content or something like a lingerie ad and they don't want that on their blog, for example. You know, how do you handle that

Yeah, so I think one thing to point out first is ads are actually more relevant than I think they've ever been. And a lot of that is related to first party data, because when that's available and you have that newsletter list and you can pass that subscriber information along, which is all done privately. But that gives a lot more information to the advertisers so they can match up an ad that's relevant to that user. And we've seen this a lot with with retargeted ads over the years. So, you know, on a site and you're shopping for Nike shoes, you can get an ad for Nike while you're visiting that site

Now, that's highly relevant to the user. Maybe as the owner of the site, you may not think that's relevant to your content. So I think that's something to distinguish. But if you want more control there, something that modern ad platforms can do is let's say you have a site about finance and you only want contextually financial related ads to show. That's something that can be achieved

In addition to that, yeah, there are a lot of restrictions available today if you want to block certain ad categories, something that maybe won't appeal to your audience, or if you want to block a specific advertiser that may be a competitor to what you do

So there's a lot of different tools that you can use to truly clean up the experience and make the ads more relevant

That's cool, because I think a lot of people assume like you put it on there and it's like, whatever shows shows and I have no control

But that's not the case. There's a narrative that digital programmatic advertising, like those budgets are shrinking and maybe it's not worth investing into because like the budgets are getting smaller

So why even spend any time on this? What are you actually seeing as far as programmatic budgets

Yeah, well, generally advertising has been around for centuries. So it's that's a form of advertising or marketing that's not going away

I was actually just just looking at something kind of a side note. So the ad spots for the Super Bowl are selling for $233,000 per second this year

So there's a lot of revenue in this area. But when it comes to Ezoic, what we're seeing in the programmatic world is advertisers are consolidating around quality inventory and first-party data

So one of the things that we did in a study at the end of the year, we saw that total identified revenue

So again, that first party data that was six times higher with our clients in 2025 versus 2024

Really? So let me make sure I understand that. If they had an identifiable audience through first party data, like email or phone number, that revenue grew 6x year over year

And that's really showing that. Yeah, the amount of revenue being allotted, excuse me, being allotted to people who have first party data available

So it shows that on the creator side, creators are also being mindful and saying

let me go out and collect some of this first party data. If I don't already have that

if I don't have a newsletter list, let me start one because we're seeing this shift

towards advertisers putting more dollars into first party data. Yeah, so it sounds like if you have first party data

like an email list, and you're also focused on growing that, you have the opportunity to take advantage

of some growing budgets in that area. And if you don't, which is kind of rare for our audience

you should start building that so you can better effectively monetize everything

Your website and your newsletter can be monetized too. Yeah, that's one of the reasons your audience

is already in such a great place because they have the lists, whether it's email or phone number

And it's just a matter of really leveraging that to your advantage. Yeah, it's still underlooked by everybody, I feel

but we have some good people who listen to this that have some great email lists and newsletters

What scale does website advertising become an actual meaningful revenue stream? I think people think it like a nice to have source of income so they kind of just ignore it What types of numbers should publishers expect We talked about RPMs a little bit but maybe if you want to give another example or maybe if you take someone who has like a site who gets you know an average of

100,000 monthly visitors. Yeah, well, well, I think it's more than a nice to have, because kind of

going back to that, that Netflix and Duolingo model, they're bringing significant revenue per

year. And we have loads of media operators that are doing millions of dollars of ad revenue per

year. When you want to think about when it becomes meaningful, if you're just starting out and you

have a small list or a small website following, the revenue isn't going to be that significant

or move the needle that much. Sure, it can be exciting to see, hey, I'm making some revenue

from my audience. But if you're a larger media operator, then it really doesn't become, I would

say, around 250,000 visitors per month. Then it becomes a contributor to your business

Got it. A lot of people think that they can just monetize their content. So

meaning blogs, articles, stuff like that. Can monetization only work for traditional blogs or articles

or can you do it for other things too? Like we talked about tools and calculators

Maybe if you have some other examples of like utility driven pages that are not just about content and how people are monetizing those

Yeah, utility driven pages are great. So anything from a calculator to even a quiz or a game

So for example, was talking to Ryan over at 6am City and they do a lot of local news reporting

but they also have a section of their site that is really driven around games

So people go to their site and they play these games and they're usually playing the game and engaging with the content

for several minutes at a time. So there's an opportunity to put an ad around the game

and make some revenue from that. Another one is like Morning Brew. They have a quiz or some type of trivia in pretty much every newsletter

almost every single day. And like if you have the trivia question in the newsletter and then the answer on the website

that's like a repeatable utility type page that can be monetized from your newsletter traffic

you know, on a daily basis and over the long run that can drive a lot of traffic. Did you have another example or did I interrupt

Yeah, so a separate example would be just diving into the e-commerce space

We've also seen examples where, sure, you are largely selling a product

You have ads down the side or at the bottom of the page. Best Buy, they're all good examples of that

it's another way to bring extra revenue into your business. I think kind of like an interesting

ogy to think about if you're kind of deciding whether or not you want to introduce ads to your

site is if you're a large media operator, I think rejecting ads entirely might be kind of like

let's say you're a upscale restaurant and you're refusing tips on principle. But the reality is

customers are already conditioned or to tip and they accept that as part of the model. So when you

think about it like that, the restaurant isn't necessarily being more premium. It's just choosing

not to collect revenue that doesn't really change their dying experience. Yeah, like people don't

really notice these types of ads unless they are so poorly designed. And if you have a strategic

experience, you're not going to have that problem. Like you think of like the most prestigious media

companies, New York Times, they have programmatic website ads on pretty much every page. Another

like utility driven pages, I think these are just smart because you can monetize

them with programmatic, but also they bring more traffic and then you bring more leads. Like if a lot of marketers

who listen to this have seen websites like swipe.co or swipefile.com or like really good emails.com

where it's just like cool examples and you can filter by category. I don't know if there's a term for these

like they're utility pages, you know, building something like that for your business or your audience

is smart not only to attract the traffic and the leads, but also you can monetize

that traffic and leads. automatically with programmatic. Have you ever seen someone put ads

on their unsubscribe page for their newsletter? Yeah, I have. Actually, Matt Polson does that and does

I was literally going to say, I guess I'm going to guess Matt Polson does that

because he optimizes every inch of everything. I haven't actually looked at his unsubscribe page

I'm still subscribing to that. Yeah. A lot of you have a big list

You're going to get a lot of traffic to that page over time. Yeah, I think the subscriber take is interesting, though

especially if you deal with a lot of people in your space that they have a newsletter and people

come over to the site and maybe there's a free reading experience and that are premium or a paid

reading experience. I think one of the things that people may not realize, but 95% of users usually

don't end up converting, whether that be to a paid plan or buying something on your site. Obviously

that's going to vary based on your business. When you have a model like that, you're catering

towards that 5% or that small percent of users who you think or hope will convert

What ads can actually do is they can monetize the users who will never pay anyway

So you can kind of take care of those freeloaders. But then it also gives a clear upgrade path because then you can put in a prompt and incentivize

somebody to remove ads from the free experience. They can upgrade and pay for that premium ad free experience in addition to any other

features or things that you might offer. Yeah. Another thing related to that is people are concerned that ads may detract or reduce their conversion rate to a paid subscription, a digital product, a course. So if I'm someone selling something like that to my audience, are ads going to cannibalize or reduce my conversions? What do you think about that

Yeah. So again, everything has to be done thoughtfully. Like to your question about do you want to put ads on the right next to the subscribe button? Probably not. But if you put it in a thoughtful place on the page, then that can actually it's not it's not going to hurt conversions. And I've gone back to Duolingo a couple of times in this conversation. Their conversion rate in 2020 was about 4% for people converting from their free plan to their pay plans

And in 2025, their conversion rate was actually 8%. And during that timeframe, they actually introduced ads on the site

And that was one of the drivers that caused people to upgrade to that premium ad-free experience

That's interesting. Yeah, that makes total sense. I didn't realize that. Now, let's go back to first-party data

There's a concern, like, because we didn't totally explain it. I don't think people totally understand how it works and how exactly you're going to monetize your website through your email list first-party data

But people are worried about like sharing that audience data with ad platforms might compromise user privacy

They don't want to share email addresses that have subscribed. How does first party data in this context actually work

And what are like the predictions in place? So I'm not just sharing all my emails with anybody

Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. And something that people should have a concern about because your newsletter list is one of the most valuable things that you can have and you don't want to give that away

But how it works in this ecosystem is the email addresses, they're all encrypted or hashed

So the best way to kind of think about it, it's like a key going into a lock. As the newsletter operator, you have the key, you have the email

And then on the other side, the advertiser, they have a unique lock for that key to where the information is passed

And they can unlock that and match the user on both sides of the system

Yeah. And that's just, I'm glad you explained that because you're not just sending someone a CSV file of all of your email addresses. Like it's, I know this might sound complicated. People haven't done it before, but it's very simple to do this, to do this process. So you can share it with Ezoic or whoever and not actually reveal the email addresses

Yeah, exactly. It's not identifiable. And then we have a team completely dedicated to compliance and privacy. So it's

something that folks shouldn't have to worry about. Yeah. And then let's talk a little bit

more about like the mechanism in which like this, this first party data is used. So you can make a

lot more when you have someone on your site, you have first party data on. Do you only make that

additional revenue when that traffic like comes from your newsletter, like they're clicking links

in your newsletter, then going to your website? Like what if they are on your email list and they

visit your website directly or they visit it from Google search or from social? Like, do you make

more from that user in that context? Just how does that work

Yeah, so there's kind of two buckets. So we've talked about identified and not identified users

It would be interesting, actually, if I can share some data or a screenshot with you that

maybe you can throw up in the notes or during our conversation

We'll put it on screen. The RPM for an identified user coming from a newsletter or from SMS

So you can see that RPM clearly versus a non-identified user. So you'll see the difference or the improvement there

One of the things that happens when you have a certain level of identified data, and this is in comparison to having no identified data, what will happen is an advertiser will recognize that, OK, maybe 50 percent of your audience is identified

They're coming from text or email. They'll pay a premium for those users that are coming directly from a newsletter, but

they will also pay a little bit more for a user that might arrive from search because

they're making the assumption that the rest of your audience is similar to the audience

that they already know about and are paying more for already. Okay. So they're making that assumption

So you're still getting paid a little bit more because you have so much identifiable traffic, but you're making the most money when the traffic is from email or SMS

I was wondering like if you have someone who's like sign up for your newsletter and they just happen to like go directly to the website a day later or come directly from Google search day later if that if that is trackable through like a cookie or through something else

Of course, if they're logged in, you think they're a logged in user, then you have that first party data

But not everybody who listens to this has like a registration and login membership function on their content sites Yeah Some people do Some people don Yeah Yeah the login is another easy way to capture that data

You brought up a good point because if you don't have your own built out login functionality on the site

an easy way to do that is something called Google OneTap or Google Single Sign-On

You probably see it a lot when you go to websites, kind of the Google Sign-On pops up

and it automatically pulls in your Gmail address. But you can actually use something like that to pass along that first party data as well, if you don't have the resources or the development to build out a login functionality on your own

Yeah, publishers, almost everybody's moving towards, obviously they're moving towards newsletters and SMS, but they're also moving towards getting people to register and create an account on the site, whether it's through Google OneTap or through their own membership system they build

and not necessarily pay for a membership or a subscription right away, but just get them logged in. Like maybe you get three articles for free

but then after that, you have to create an account. And then maybe you have 10 articles for free that month

but after 10, you got to pay for the subscription. It's just there's so much valuable in a registered user

Yeah. Another cool thing going on right now is have you heard of reward ads

Not really. I don't know. Maybe, but I don't know if I'm really on the same thing. Let me know

Yeah. So just speaking about making a user or only allowing a user to access three articles

for free made me think of this. Instead of having a model where you make people pay

or subscribe to gain access to another article, what you could do is you could have them

and this could be an option too, you could have all these options, but you could say, hey, click this button, watch an ad

and then you'll get access to another article or another three articles. What that does is it prompts the user to watch an ad

and then in exchange, they get access to something, whether that be additional articles

more credits, something like that. I haven't seen them in the context of content sites and blogs and articles

Of course, I've seen it in the gaming context, especially mobile gaming, somewhat common

but also on, you know, like web pages where you can play games or do quizzes or whatever

That's cool. I just haven't haven't seen that yet. Is that something you thought people do with Ezoic

Yeah so traditionally it was something that happened a lot in games and apps but it becoming more common on on the web experience And it is something publishers or media operators are doing now If they have you can call it premium content or you can just call it if users want to get access to something that they willing to sit through an ad and watch

Kind of like if you're on YouTube and you want to get to the next segment of that video, you have to watch a short ad

It's the same concept. Yeah, I like that. And I think a lot of people like memberships or paid subscriptions can be great for some businesses, but they're not for everybody

A lot of times you're better off having people register after a couple articles and unlock more articles through a mechanism like this, where you unlock revenue from everybody who does that versus getting a tiny amount to be a paid subscriber

And then a lot of these content subscriptions have really high churn. And a lot of times you're better off with like an ad supported model and maybe just that or maybe a one off product along with that ad supported model

There's one more concern that I want us to address, which is surprisingly common

People feel like keeping users in my newsletters better than sending them to a website

Like they hesitate to ask people to click something in the newsletter because they just want to like give them everything in the email and not ever ask them to click anything

Is that a mistake? What do you think about that? Yeah, well, I think it kind of goes back to how we started the conversation. But if you're keeping people in a newsletter or your newsletter only, you're missing out on an opportunity to build trust, credibility, build authority. And then you're also missing out on that opportunity to open up a new revenue source that's ad supported on your website

Yeah, and it's just, I think just overlooking how people use the internet and read content, like people read long form content on websites, people want to get out of the inbox pretty quickly. They don't want to be in their inbox for an hour at a time reading stuff. It's generally better to have a shorter newsletter. I'm a believer that there should still be value in the newsletter without having to click something. So like everything shouldn't be clickable to get some type of editorial value or content value

But if you're not optimizing your newsletter for clicks, especially clicks that go to your website, that's a really bad newsletter strategy, in my opinion

Yeah it all about finding your balance right Absolutely If someone wants to learn more about Ezoic website traffic and monetization who a good fit for that Because if you have two visitors per month Ezoic probably not for you

But like what type of clients and publishers and companies do you work with? Yeah, so I think anyone who has a meaningful amount

of website traffic or a subscriber list, about 250,000 visitors per month

or subscribers on your list, because with that size of a subscriber list

if you're not actually using it yet to drive traffic to your website

then you can actually begin doing that and begin generating significant revenue pretty quickly

Those would be the metrics in terms of the size of the audience

And then, yeah, it doesn't just have to be a content site. It can be those web apps or those tools

or SaaS businesses, anything like that would be a good fit as long as you meet those traffic requirements

Any final advice or closing thoughts for publishers, founders who are skeptical

about website monetization or just any closing thoughts in general that you think people should know

or are things that we didn't cover? Yeah, I think just to kind of wrap it up, I would say that the question

isn't whether ads belong in a modern media business. It's whether you're using them intentionally

or are you leaving money, data and that leverage on the table

Yeah, and some of my takeaways from this were if you don't prioritize your website

and website traffic at all, you're leaving a lot on the table, both as far as revenue and user experience

and the deeper relationship that you can build with an audience. And then number two

if you do use programmatic website ads already or maybe direct sole website ads

and you're not using first party data to increase how much you're making your RPM with Ezoic

you're missing out on a lot of money. So I think that's, those are some of my takeaways among many

Yeah, that's a good summary. I appreciate that. And it was really a pleasure talking to you

and trying to get more information about this opportunity out there. Yeah, this is great. I honestly learn a lot every time I talk to you and learn a lot more from this today. And I hope it helps people understand like the channel, the biggest channel they're probably missing out on. I think we did a good job with that. We'll put your LinkedIn below. We'll wrap it up there. Thanks

Awesome. And we will see you at the New Media Summit later this month. I'll see you soon