Bitcoin Forum

Hi Everyone,

So we are running a daily news site in Hungary which has currently around 60K page views a month.

We have continuous attempts to generate steady revenue for the site but all our attempts were futile so far.

ICOs go to agencies to promote their projects and they pay out in tokens after very long time the project is concluded.

The community isn't keen to donate to upkeep the site and to have finally funds to develop it.

Google Ads pay meager amounts in Hungary and it doesn't cover much.

Referral links which we push does generate some revenue but we like to get rid of those because we consider it unethical especially if you like to build an authority news site on which the community here can rely on.

We have diversified traffic sources, very strong in organic searches, an active social media community and first and foremost an expert team of writers who cover every aspect of the cryptoverse.

I like to ask the community for hints that could help us to make things better or if there are members here who like to cooperate or help the cause.

The site is: http://www.bitcoinbazis.hu/

Every comment is much appreciated.

Thank you.

Not all of them (for both parts of the sentence).

Then try to provide full articles for a small price (or a paid membership) and only include the summary for free users (some might pay).

Sell ad spaces on forums (ex. Auctions (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=73.0) and Digital goods (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=93.0)).

Hi SFR10,

thanks for the comments.

1) It is true not all of them. Let us say from 100 mails sent out introducing our site, maybe 10 replies and 1 who agrees to advertise. We did back in March an email marketing campaign and sent out to 500+ ICOs and must say, the results were pretty disappointing.

2) "Then try to provide full articles for a small price (or a paid membership) and only include the summary for free users (some might pay)." - this a great idea thank you very much! I was thinking first to provide research, journals, academic level articles as premium content but definitely going to experiment with your suggestion. We have Satoshipay already installed - yeah definitely will try!

Thanks for the third recommendation too - I was not paying too much attention to bitcointalk threads (or rather I had no time for it) but yes, definitely will do from now on.

you can run ads by network !

We tried CoinTraffic last year for three months (the truth we had that time pretty low traffic around 20K per month) and it was very disappointing. They offered CPM - €1 slider - €1 static - €3 mobile banner payout. So we decided to switch to AdSense. We might go back to one of the Ad providers with a proper tariff table.

Try to make English variant of your site and then tell more about ICO, like ICObench for example.

I have a question for you: how much of your content is original and local? As in, how much of the news or content that you post is fresh, found nowhere else, and originates from Hungarian-only sources? If it's significant, you could consider partnering with other English-content sites to sort of syndicate your content with them.

i.e. You agree to provide English versions of unique stories to an English site, translated from your content, for publishing, and they, in return provide you with stories in Hungarian to publish on your site.

This might not do much to increase revenue but it could diversify your audience, perhaps even bump advertising revenues. Just a thought.

I doubt that all of it his original content. Looks like he has aggregated the data from other news sources, I could be wrong though. Instead of partnering with English sites, he can hire a translator who does all of it for him.

He already is limiting the website by targeting specific audience. I mean out of their population how many would be into crypto and then filter from among them who would actually look for blogs to read crypto news. The resulting number would be like he said around 60k or so.

Yes, but partnering won't cost him anything, and also solves the issue of rights, because it's actually considered stealing if you simply use the content and translate him, plus partnering means backlinking from both sites - he already says he has quite a bit of organic traffic, so that's okay and actually good. 60k organic traffic is actually quite a big chunk, and specific audience can be leveraged. Small readership but actual interest, that's actually really hard to achieve.

Another question to consider is: Who is the audience who would prefer reading about crypto in their native language instead of English? My guess would be older individuals (maybe 50+), who may still have a significant amount of money to invest and are looking for new investment venues. You could further refine your content to target these demographics specifically, and then partner up with investment firms or other companies who target them or develop products or services yourself.

This "problem" with not site and articles, news..
Main reason non English language.
Because Hungary auditory is not big.

There are authority news websites that promote scams and they're fine, now crypto advertisements are banned but back in the days a lot of them were popping up, and as far as I know, you can not filter your banner ads to choose what to display to your readers.

You could try another PPC network, there are many around, you could display 1 PPC on the top and 1 CPM on the bottom. Of course, it won't sure all the costs but it still participate, everything is good to take.

You could try to advertise some referral links to sites where users can earn free coins, I am thinking about GPT websites

Hi Balaxi,

I believe that I can help you with your traffic issue. I am able to do mass-promotions on Reddit to boost your traffic, readers, and click-through rate (for much less).
If this is something that interests you, please contact me on Telegram: @Azza1070
Thank you.

- Aaron

60k monthly, not a small traffic volume but also is nothing special. you have the problem you're limited to Hungary audit, and if from Adsense you have a low payout value
very hard are you going to find service with a better pay rate. I think you need to find someone to sell your banner space from your country because of more targeted visitors.

60k per month isnt really bad at all if you can sustain that traffic then monetizing would be somehow easy.

Risky payment and wont really have any assurance yet those tokens might not get any value in the end which means tendency you would end up
on recieving pennies.
Already being mentioned above PPC might really be a worthy move to be done. Cost might not really be a big deal because based on my experienced they arent charging to high.


If this site would be on English language and not on the local ones this would somehow help

Why not offer paid subscriptions? Or offer to have premium accounts with payment where premium content shall be given. I’m pretty sure that among your readers there are those who use your website for businees or investment purposes and it would be a need for them to read articles from your site regularly. You could lock access of some of your best articles which would need having a premium account for you to view.

You can sell links at the main page (and banners) for crypto companies to become better at search optimisation in your region.

You really need to make some custom deals for selling advertisements.
Do not agree to be paid in possibly worthless tokens for promoting ICOs. Most ICOs have a marketing budget, they'll pay you in ETH as well.

I don't think that adding referral links is unethical, as long as you mention it in the article.
Another option is to reach out to crypto related services and ask them whether they would want a paid op-ed written about their service.

Perhaps you can also cross-post original articles to Steemit for example, you'll be able to double-dip and earn both ways. 

Hi,

I am part of www.dippli.com, a crypto news site, and we are looking to expand or potential partner up with other sites. Maybe we could have a talk and see if we could figure something out together? If interested then contact me on info[at]dippli.com or stop by our TG group for a chat https://t.me/dippli_news.

Looking forward to hear from you.

/R

Hi,

Not sure why should we create EN version, isn't feels already crowded in EN?
The ICO part - you are completely right. We plan to have a separate section for ICOs.

Thanks for the feedback.

Hi,

I would say, very low. 80% of the content comes from the EN sites and the rest local. Problem is, that not much happening around here (yet) and hunting those news down that might be interesting is a pain in the ass. We are partners with CoinTelegraph since 2016 and we posted 2 or 3 guest posts on their site, but problem is still the same: not much happens here - or we are just unaware of it, thus we have nothing to publish on it.

You are absolutely right though! Thank you very much!

Yes, as I mentioned, 80 - 20 between local content (which is usually advertisement from an ICO, or a coffee shop accepting crypto, or a local crypto ad site etc.) and EN source content from major cryptonews sites.

We are not limiting ourselves, on the contrary: we have a clear vision to make 10 million Hungarians familiar with cryptos. :) Sounds small indeed, but from 60K to 1M is still a long road - if I am a bit realistic. We had in December, January 200K traffic so 1M is doable, regardless the actual BTC price, which still affects your monthly traffic. :)

Hi,

thanks for the suggestion. Our Analytics shows that our main age group is between 25 and 34 - they represent 38% of all the users since June 2016, second largest is between 35 and 44 with 28%. The age group you mentioned represent 10% of the total readers. What we are a little bit proud of is that we have slightly more female readers (20%) as the industry average (see Huobi report).

Answering the 'Why not in English?' question - one hand, we put great emphasis on quality. No matter if 80% of our content comes from EN sources, it has to be well written, so our readers come back for the content. Second and more important reason I think is the overall lack of proper EN language knowledge in Hungary which hinders many to read about crypto in EN. :(

Yupp - we serve potentially only 10 million people (plus 2-3 million more living abroad) but we still wanna see 10M Hungarians using crypto :) (we had one of the largest hyperinflation ever in history :D - we don't want another one again).

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestions. I am afraid we promoted blindly 1 or 2 scams as well since they paid for the PRs, newsletters etc. But to be honest, no matter the disclaimer that we put out, you just don't want your Readers that after few months they come back to you and say, hey I invested in BitConnect, FirstCoin etc. because of your article. I think those publishers should exercise some restraint and to not promote obvious scams.

Nowadays we work only with AdSense + just started again working with CoinTraffic - so far all good, covers few expenditures but still meagre amounts if you like to develop/reinvest/build/add new things to the site or you think beyond it.

I don't really know too many GPTs, we use one faucet (freebitco.in) which is actually relatively awesome cos 1-2 person signs up to it every day. Now that you mentioned, we might add their banners to some more visible place. Thank you :)

Thanks Aaron,

I will keep in mind.

Hi,

yes, one of the lowest AdSense payout rate is in HU. :D

We just started working again with CT for a fixed monthly rate and started looking for others, signed up for Bitmedia and RunCPA.

Selling banners for local companies makes sense IF we have some relevant companies here. We are not keen to display jewellery or sunglasses ads, it doesn't feels relevant.

We wanted to make a co-op with e-com shops selling hardware, GPUs etc. because we have a lot of miner type, DIY, geek type of Readers interested in BTC/alt mining. Also planned to open a e-shop selling Pandaminer last year, but they were really messy last year summer. :D

Hi -

we asked few weeks ago on Facebook the audience, "Would you pay for premium content?" and well, 10% said yes and the majority said no (I think around 200 people voted, so not a huge number but still large rejected the idea). After that we got a bit cautious to introduce it. Still in our mind, but we try to figure out how to make our Readers accept such decision.

Yupp we are trying. Point is, when you go to ICOs for instance and they hear about the 60K, they say sorry, to low. Now with established crypto-companies we didn't try out yet. On the other hand, FX brokers with local branch are eager to advertise on the site but they want you to sign up to their affiliate and then you maybe get some signups. This is a double edge sword 'cos it could go very well but in most cases is too low income to cover even the basic expenditures. Recently had to experience the same story with Revolut.

Hi - we do sustain with more content and with higher activity on Facebook (the rest of the social media platforms are irrelevant in Hungary, except maybe Instagram which is for the youngest generation). Our strength is in organic traffic + social media.

PPC - definitely going to put more effort in it. Thank you.

Now that so many of you recommend English, we might think on adding an EN section and publish there ONLY the original local Hungary or Central-Europe related content.

We are still based in HU and the mission is the same: 10 million Hungarian with crypto. :D

Hi!

Thank you, I will reach out soon. :)

Thanks everyone for the suggestions, recommendations! I will definitely utilise some of the thoughts here and if you like to share more of your opinions, please feel free.

20% or less is actually a huge amount. As you can imagine, there is a huge, huge demand for new, fresh content that's not covered by all the major sites and at the same time. I'm not even talking about the original content that comes out from interviewing some of the big players, but talking about the local news, on the ground, in countries other than West Europe and North America.

You've said you're unaware of this but you have a resource. 60k organic reach in Hungary? If even 0.1% of people respond to you or reach out to you to give you fresh stories, that's 60 people ready to talk to you - mining? crypto-related business? bitcoin meetups? I see a lot of potential for you to find your fresh content, and passport it out to English sites. If you're interested in pursuing that slowly, PM me and we can talk about that =)

You know, as I read your comment I just realised it. There isn't much coverage about Central Europe in the mainstream EN crypto news sites. And then I realised that thanks to the large Hungarian minority in Serbia, Roumania, Slovakia and Croatia, I can tap in to those countries too, not just to Hungary... or at least to get fresh content out from those neighbouring countries. Actually one of our writer lives in Serbia, he is trilingual. Another has Hungarian minority background lived in Slovakia (bilingual). Yes interested, I'll pm. And yes, we were ineffective promoting this sort of interaction with the local community. And I am sure they have stories.