Case Study: Website with Advertising Model: TWIP.org

Posted by Bart on June 26, 2011

This Case Study is about a website making money only with Advertising (in this case, Google AdSense) and based on “User Generated Content” (the website’s content is created by the Internet users): The World in Photos: www.twip.org

Early 2008, I really thought I had finally found a great solution to make money online without doing much. The Smart Passive Income, as someone would say!

TWIP.org is a website based on “User Generated Content” (Internet users create content, pretty much like Wikipedia with articles being written for free by individuals). Between October 2007 and April 2008, TWIP.org was generating between 2,500 and 3,000 US dollars a month (only with Google Adsense) with a maximum of 3,300 US dollars for 1 month. This website that so far was only generating a small revenue had suddenly “exploded”.

Considering the very low running cost of the website (a few hours of work a month, a small domain name fee and a small hosting fee), most of the revenue was actually profit. As we are 2 business partners on this project, we only had to double this amount in the coming months to make 3,000 US dollars a month each! And that would be additional to our other revenue sources.

All we had to do was to quickly get more visitors. We already had jumped from 3,000 to more than 10,000 unique visitors a day in a few months and there was no reason this number didn’t continue to move up.

Unfortunately it did no move up. Or very slightly. And the revenue started to decrease, for a reason that we still don’t understand today. In April 2008 we only made 2,500 US dollars, then 2,000 in May 2008, 1,700 in June 2008, to finally stabilize at 1,500 US dollars in July 2008 and after. Today, more than 3 years later, TWIP.org still has around 10,000 visitors a day in average (from all around the world, which means that the volume per country is very small) and makes 1,000 to 1,200 US dollars a month. Not bad. But not enough to live with it. Especially when you have to share between 2 people.

TWIP (The World In Photos) was the first database of pictures of the world that everyone could access and develop. We started it in 2005, long before Google launched its own picture website, Panoramio, and long before all the others website doing the same appeared.

TWIP ‘s model is simple: every Internet user can register for free to the site and upload pictures of landscapes, cities, places, monuments, etc. All pictures are then validated by the TWIP team. Once published, pictures are accessible to every Internet user, even non-registered. However the owner of the pictures keeps the copyright. Anyone who would like to use a picture published on TWIP should first contact the owner and get an authorization.

Everything is free. The website is developed by its members.

We monetize TWIP with Google Adsense that is very convenient for this kind of websites. We use the maximum of 3 ad placements per page that Google authorizes. The number of pages on TWIP is exponential because each new picture creates a new page. But it gets even better than that : TWIP is translated into more than 50 different languages including Tagalog, Khmer, Catalan or Esperanto. This means that each new page shows up in more than 50 languages : each new picture actually creates more than 50 different new pages.

In addition, all these languages allow TWIP to appear on many local language search engines, and not only the famous ones. It’s much easier to be in a top position for a request in Khmer or Catalan, than for a request in English or Spanish.

The blog is the only part
of the content that we produce ourselves

TWIP attracts globally a lot of visitors, but the problem is to qualify and target this audience:

- People come from all over the world, but only a small volume from each country. We don’t have a significant reach in any country.
- People come from all walks of life. There is not a type profile of TWIP visitors. We can’t target a specific community.
- People don’t stay long on the website and many don’t come back. It’s difficult to secure the loyalty of the visitors.

However TWIP is a proof that it is possible to make money with online advertising without having to spend a lot of time and money in website set-up, website development and promotion.

Of course, spending more time and more money would probably result in a greater revenue, however TWIP is a “side project” for us. We are already quite busy with our main jobs, and don’t have enough time to spend on it. In addition, relying only on Google Adsense is a risk and we could lose everything overnight.

If you plan to launch such a website yourself, it is of course recommended that you try to have a more qualified audience and more diversified advertising revenue.

Find more Case Studies in the Case Studies pages.