Money made by placing ads on websites, visible parts of the software, or in-app - or present sponsors to your audience. A recurring income with a bad reputation - often only works for large communities or high traffic websites.
Requires:
- Setup of a payment mechanism
- Integration of an ad network
- Might require communication with individual sponsors who want to promote themselves
Variants & Options:
- Ads on web pages: Generates monthly recurring revenue
- In-app ads: Generates monthly recurring revenue
- Ad-free option: Integrating a paid account to opt-out of ads (e.g., via a private donation platform or memberspace)
- CarbonAds
- EthicalAds
- Google AdSense etc. (On webpage ads)
| Characteristics | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Effort to set-up | Hours | Integration of code for ads and bank info is sufficient |
| Effort to maintain | Low | Maybe minor version updates |
| Cost to set-up | None | |
| Cost to maintain | None | |
| One-time Income | Medium | Individual sponsors who want to promote themselves might pay more for specific communities |
| Recurring Income | Low | CPM is 1-10 USD - large audiences are needed |
| Income Predictability | High | Ad revenue is not very volatile |
| Full income Threshold | 1M+ | Assuming visitors to website per month; based on 5k USD salary (pre-Tax) |
| Recipient | I or C | |
| Additional Work | None | Maybe little extra work to manage ads |
| Visibility | N/A | Companies using ads will only see ad network |
| Necessity to pay | None | Users pay with visit / looking at ads |
| Entry Threshold | None | |
| Countervalue | None | |
| Scalability | Medium | Scales with the number of users |
| Effort for marketing | Low | No marketing to get ads - maybe to enlarge community or site usage. |
| Competitors | None | At least no competition of ads for the project's homepage, etc. |
| Software types | Tools | Esp. for OSS with visible content Apps, Programs, or Websites (e.g., docu) |