How Do You Monetize A Site Like This?

[Newchanka]

We've been building out this site that specializes in investigative analysis of ICOs. In the process we have been reviewing a lot of scams and have received threats from scammers. Our reputation makes us refuse most paid reviews because there is no sure way of knowing they're not scams, especially gambling sites some of which have asked for ad opportunities.

The reason for this is that we want our readers to trust every information they read on our site. However, we've been thinking of the best approach to monetize the site. What do you thing is the best strategy for this site https://cryptoinfowatch.com/indigen-foundation-a-noble-cause-marred-by-scam/

[1714990338]

1714990338

[TryNinja]

I don't think paid reviews are all bad. There is only a major problem with that when you are totally biased on someone's project because they paid you (e.g: they are a scam/liars and you agree to say a bunch of good stuff about them in your article).

If all you do is a (really) honest review, I don't see anything wrong on accepting money to review it or feature the article in the top of the website (p.s: don't forget to make it clear that you got paid for that).

[Welsh]

First of all, build your content, and establish a good reputation. Then you'll find that businesses will be willing to sponsor the website, and advertise on there. However, before that you'll need to be generating good enough traffic to the site, organically. You would need to take a look at each of these businesses, and decide which ones you'd like to add to your advertisement slots.

However, ICO's probably aren't a good advertisement model due to the conflict of interest. If you want to help the community, and not simply earn off an informative site keep the conflict of interest down to a minimum.

[elda34b]

What about banner ads? I've seen several crypto review site allows project (not ICO) to publish ads on their platform, like Etherscan for example. It's not exactly paid reviews. You can also use paid short-link services such as clk.sh. It might be annoying for some users though, but it's worth a try.

On second thought, you can accept paid reviews as long as you can review objectively (even this is highly unlikely).

[EVERMINT]

What if you based the pay scale of paid reviews on the quality of the service being reviewed?

For example: If the total score of the site/service in review is positive... payment is 0.1 BTC. If the service is crappy/shady etc. the amount is double. This will put the onus on the service to actually have an excellent experience and would potentially mitigate the pay for positive paid reviews scenario.

[stomachgrowls]

First of all, build your content, and establish a good reputation. Then you'll find that businesses will be willing to sponsor the website, and advertise on there. However, before that you'll need to be generating good enough traffic to the site, organically. You would need to take a look at each of these businesses, and decide which ones you'd like to add to your advertisement slots.

However, ICO's probably aren't a good advertisement model due to the conflict of interest. If you want to help the community, and not simply earn off an informative site keep the conflict of interest down to a minimum.

This is actually the first struggle when you do really have the plans on monetizing your site where building reputation and generating good traffic is the biggest challenge but not an
enough thing for us to stop as long op do have the passion on publishing honest advertisements and plausible things to be recognized is there but not an assurance thing.
It would just really matter on success or failure but come to think these things wont happen overtime.

[Newchanka]

What if you based the pay scale of paid reviews on the quality of the service being reviewed?

For example: If the total score of the site/service in review is positive... payment is 0.1 BTC. If the service is crappy/shady etc. the amount is double. This will put the onus on the service to actually have an excellent experience and would potentially mitigate the pay for positive paid reviews scenario.

The problem with this approach is that it would ruin the reputation we're trying to build. We usually find to be scams ICOs that have been rated 4.5 star by some review sites. We feel that the ad money is responsible for lack of being thorough. This is what we want to avoid.

[Stedsm]

Get a good PR rating from Google, try to advertise your site first over AdWords or whichever you find cheap for your website, check and use the best keywords over there to gain quality traffic, take user interests like what they want to see there (paid reviews or paid advertising). Even if you go for paid reviews, I guess you may hire an Editor to give the keywords the better finishing to keep up with the reputation of the website. You may then proceed with small text links of ICOs that you believe will surely deliver (but chances of getting scammed are higher, so DYOR at an extreme level before even letting an ICO content landing on your website's page/s). Try to find direct relationships to businesses that relate to the specific content of a published material, then show that advert only for that article and ask for a better price if you're going to give them some great exposure. Going for ICO adverts is literally stupid and even I stopped one of my friends to advertise such material who've got more than 10k subscribers at his crypto related news website.