Monday, May 07, 2007

Hubpages: SEO and Dynamic Monetization Innovations

User-generated content is a key secular trend driving consumer behavior, Internet usage, and technology. The legs of the content stool are content creation, search engine optimization, monetization, syndication, and tracking/analytics.

For most small publishers, the process today involves bespoke integration of point solutions to allow for content to be easily created, served, monetized, and tracked. A typical blogger may use Typepad, Ad Sense, Feedburner, and Google Analytics. Not only are solutions stitched together via JavaScript, but also today's solutions fail to provide search engine optimization and dynamic monetization.

Given the Google is a vital source of traffic, it is very important that content appear in natural search results. Given domain aging, link analysis, etc., new sites suffer from very poor natural search placement and limited organic traffic.

Today, content creators need to pick an ad network and STATICALLY bind their content to a single monetization source and format. There is no way to ensure that the most effective ad unit, placement, color, ad network provider, etc. is used for any given piece of content.

Monetization, therefore, is clearly sub-optimized, while natural search results are hard to come by. The net result - very limited traffic and ineffective monetization.

Today, Hubpages, a Humwin company, announced a major upgrade to its self-publishing service. Hubpages provides an integrated content creation, SEO, ad yield optimization, and tracking solution that automatically ensures the best possible natural search results and the most optimal monetization programs.

Since launch in August 2006, Hubpages has enjoyed spectacular growth:
  • traffic is growing 150%+ month over month, to 2.4m uniques and 6.2m page views
  • 90% of the traffic is from organic search - ie SEO in action
  • 43% increase in ad yields per page due to Hubpage's Behavioral Formatting Yield Optimization technology
  • 20,000 hubs created and 14,000 authors on the system
  • $1,800/month/top authors in income
In short, Hubpages delivers not only traffic to authors, but also optimizes the ad yield without any required work from the author to pick an Ad network, ad unit, and ad format.

Abstracting SEO and ad optimization represents a vital breakthrough in freeing authors to focus on content creation and not on bespoke integration of a set of tools with a static tie to a single source of revenue.

1 comment:

  1. Good synopsis, Will.

    HubPages is one of many revenue streams available to writers who love to write and not be bothered by choosing a revenue model to support their writing.

    As a Blogger publisher, I use several revenue models on my blogs and have to say that sites like HubPages offer a much easier way to generate autopilot income.

    Jim DeSantis
    HubPages Video Tutorials
    http://www.jdanswers.com/hubindex.html

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