Monetization Planner: Which Methods, Networks & Platforms Fit Your Property, Traffic and Niche
Tell the planner what you have (blog, newsletter, podcast, app...), how much traffic it gets and what niche it is in, and get a ranked mix of monetization methods with the networks and platforms that will actually accept you.
Your plan: 6 methods for a free tool / utility
Start with the first two; add the rest as the audience grows. Only providers that would accept a property of this size are shown.
Display Advertising Easy
Banner and responsive ad units sold by the thousand impressions: the default first dollar for any content site.
Display advertising is the sale of space on your pages to advertisers, priced per thousand impressions (CPM) and paid to you as a share of what the advertiser spent. You place a script, the network runs an auction for every impression, and the winning ad… Read the guide →
SaaS & Micro-SaaS Subscriptions Hard
Charge a monthly or annual fee for software: the highest-margin, highest-multiple revenue on the web, and the most work.
Software as a service is the subscription business model applied to a tool: users pay monthly or yearly for continued access, and you keep improving it. Micro-SaaS is the one-person version: a narrow tool solving one problem for one audience, often born from a free… Read the guide →
Affiliate Marketing Medium
Recommend products with tracked links and earn a commission on every sale: the highest-earning method for review and comparison content.
Affiliate marketing is recommending someone else's product with a link that identifies you, and receiving a commission when a reader buys. A network or the merchant's own program provides the tracking link, records the sale through a cookie or a code, and pays you after… Read the guide →
API Access & Data Licensing Hard
Sell programmatic access to what your site knows: an API with usage tiers, datasets, feeds and reports.
If your property collects, computes or curates something, other businesses may pay to get it programmatically: an API for your directory's listings, your price history, your rankings, your calculator's logic, your dataset of whatever you cover. Data licensing is the same thing delivered as files,… Read the guide →
Donations, Tips & Crowdfunding Easy
Let readers pay what they want: tip jars, Buy Me a Coffee, Ko-fi, Patreon-style support and one-off campaigns.
Donations and tips ask the audience to pay voluntarily: a "buy me a coffee" button, a Ko-fi page, a recurring "supporter" option, a GitHub Sponsors profile for open-source work, a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign for a specific project, a Patreon page with no locked content.… Read the guide →
Push, Pop-under & Interstitial Ads Easy
Aggressive formats that pay high CPMs, accept almost any niche and pay weekly, at the cost of reader trust and search safety.
This family covers the ad formats that force attention rather than earning it: pop-unders that open a new window behind the reader's, interstitials that cover the page, direct links that send a click straight to an advertiser, and push notifications that the reader agrees to… Read the guide →
How the planner works
Each method in the directory carries the property types it suits, the traffic it needs to be worth doing and how passive it is; each network carries the minimum traffic it accepts and the niches it allows. The planner scores every method against your answers, drops anything your traffic cannot support yet, and shows the providers of each kind that would take you today. It is a starting point, not a strategy: read the guides, run the calculator for numbers, then check the deals before you sign up.