Shawn Hogan’s DigitalPoint.com $10,000 per month
Google pays Digital Point about $10,000 a month, depending on how many people view or click on those ads, according to Shawn D. Hogan, owner and CTO of Digital Point.
Digital Point Solutions is a software company in San Diego which publishes an online forum, forums.digitalpoint.com. The forum attracts about 15,000 users and much more visitors. Any forum member who starts a new forum discussion topic receives half of the advertising revenue paid to the site by Google for ads on the front page of that topic section. The discussion’s creator then splits his share with others who post messages. Google does not actually advertise on the Digital Point site. Through Google’s AdSense program, it places ads on the forum, similar to the ads that appear next to search results on Google. Google scans the text on the forum’s pages, then displays related ads. If the discussion is about computer hardware, for instance, ads for DVD drives might display.
Mr. Hogan said he started the revenue sharing approach in 2004 “as kind of a marketing gimmick.”
“But everyone seemed to think it was a cool idea,” he said. “I saw a lot of other sites doing the same thing maybe six months later.”
Shawn said it was difficult to say whether the financial incentives had made the forum’s participants more active, because its growth rate was about the same before and after it started paying users. Either way, the payoff is small.
“In the best case scenario, someone might make $50 a month, so they’re definitely not quitting their jobs to do this,” he said. “But it might be enough to buy a nice dinner.”
One concern, Shawn said, was whether the forum’s members would skew their postings to earn more money. For instance, since advertisers in some categories, like sexual performance drugs, pay much more to place their ads on Google and its affiliated sites, you might expect technology discussions to randomly veer in that direction.
“But that hasn’t happened, thankfully,” Shawn said. “Probably because there isn’t that much revenue in it for them.”
