Posted in Online Publishing Strategy	September 26, 2008

"Every online publisher takes advertising, the question is ‘from whom’?" – Ed Coburn, Publishing Director at Harvard Medical School

The economics of online publishing vary from publisher to publisher. Whether you sell products, ads, sponsorships, or make money in other ways, you are taking advertising from someone—maybe even yourself.

From our research, there are ultimately 9 ways to maximize online revenue: selling listings, impressions, clicks, leads, books & products, periodicals, memberships and events. This article is going to focus on selling sponsorships.

When a related company sponsors your website, they are paying to brand a section of site. There are several opportunities for sponsorship on your website, here are the top four most popular spots being used by publishers:

Topic Sponsorship - RCR Wireless sells sponsorships to their individual topics. In their Wireless Retailers section, the sponsor gets their ad in the leaderboard, large ad box, medium box, and a skyscraper. They also share any leads on people who download their Wireless Essentials special report. Sponsors also get a small banner ad once per week in the Wireless Retailers section of RCR Wireless Daily Update Newsletter.

Internal Sponsorship – MarthaStewart.com has several magazine brands, so when you go to MarthaStewart.com, you’re looking at an Internet Hub of the entire Martha Stewart brand. However, almost every tab on her website is sponsored by a different magazine. For example, if you click on the topic “Whole Living”, you’re brought to a section of her website dedicated to her magazine brand “Body + Soul”. The same goes for when you click on the topic “Food”, where advertisements change to ads for her “Everyday Food” magazine.

Tool Sponsorship – AutoTrader.com lets companies sponsor different tools offered to their users. For example, they have a “Certified Cars” search that is sponsored by Lexus. Underneath the tool on the home page, there is a prominent “Sponsored by Lexus” logo and a link to go to the Lexus website.

Content Sponsorship – Computerworld.com offers sponsored content in their “Zones” section. To access a zone, the user must enter their information. From there, they may have access to sponsored videos, white papers and webcasts. Current zones are sponsored by Google, Novell, Symantec, CDW, SAS, Brocade and Fluke Networks, all with unique content and leads that are shared with the sponsor.

Other sponsorship opportunities can be forums, blogs, tool reviews, and other dedicated sections. If you offer sponsorship opportunities to advertisers, there is serious real estate on your website to define. Define the areas of your website that you’re willing to host sponsorship, or where sponsors could add content that is useful to your users (like Computerworld) to see where you might be able to maximize online revenue.