We all know that its very tough to monetize even a successful website. Adsense, for example, pays out less than $1 CPM. So, you can have a very successful website, attract over 1000 people a day, and still make only a couple bucks a day for your efforts and success.
SpeakToMe is a new service, launched earlier this month, that promises $50 per 1000 uniques for anyone willing to give it a go. What do you have to do to collect? Go live in front of your audience, and give them a chance to speak to you directly over the telephone and via a web link for a per-minute charge.
“The biggest problem for successful online publishers is getting paid for their work,” says Ted Murphy, President of SpeakToMe. “The three legged stool of print journalism, publisher-reader-advertiser, is simply not available online. The only categories that get paid online are keyword search and classifieds. 3% of the internet page views make over 75% of the money. Search and classifieds generate a $40 CPM while everybody else makes less than $1 CPM.”
The answer to the problem, Mr. Murphy figures, is to offer a service that allows readers to pay the publisher directly for a personal, one-on-one pay-by-the-minute private session. That’s where the SpeakToMe Expert Service product comes in. Webmasters can toss the SpeakToMe widget on their website and accept payment from their audience within the comfortable confines of their own website. There are no up-front costs to the webmaster, and the set up procedure takes minutes.
Will SpeakToMe’s new approach catch on? A lot depends upon whether bloggers and their audience are willing to try something new. What is your opinion? Are there any online personalities you would pay to speak to directly? Do you ever have questions you would pay to have answered immediately by an expert? Let me know.
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The amount they are offering is huge! Is this true? Anybody got paid by paid by them?