If there’s any doubt in your mind about the ability of online publishers to make money out of ads, then the latest reports from various research groups should dispel them pretty fast. According to Digital TV Research, advertisers will be spending a total of $106 billion every year on online ads alone by 2016. The question then is not whether there can be money made on ads, but whether you will be able to get a chunk out of advertiser’s budgets.

If you are an ordinary publisher who’s still making sense about this whole monetization thing, the fact that you are not feeling the effect of all that money spent on ads should not get you down. Sure, you have yet a lot to learn about online publishing and how to monetize your sites, but you can look at it two ways – that you have a loser site you’d better ditch or that you have a site that needs improvement but has lots of potential.

The point is that even if you are not making money right now, a few years down the road will still see online advertisers spending huge cash that will benefit publishers who can deliver to them what they want – exposure to their target clients. Now is a good time as any to start learning the ropes and tweaking your sites, and maybe even entire business model, to make sure that in time you will be one of the many online publishers happily benefiting from their websites.

Originally posted on October 31, 2011 @ 4:57 am