Trying a new monetization on my almost 10yo website
In 2017, I introduced Value-Added-Services. I thought since there is a clear imbalance between supply of answers and the demand of answers, a user should pay to get an answer within 24hours.
I signed with a full-time retired judge to take care of the paid questions for 50% of the price and occasionally answer some questions pro-bono.
I started getting some revenues but nothing to brag about ~ around $1K/month. Ads were making extra $600/mo but I ditched them because they make the site slower and hurt SEO.
Traffic kept growing steadily and we're getting almost 500K visits/month. Then I thought that this is where the real monetization is, so I introduced a service where the answers from the experts are locked and you have to pay $2 to unlock it and read it all.
I was seeing around 12 ~ 20 conversions per day. So I thought maybe that $2 should give you access to all unlocked answers on the site for 24H.
I implemented that but the conversions did not change. I did a lot of A/B testing, I even decreased the prices to $0.1 but did not see a substantial change so I confirmed this thing is not working.
So I left it as is for a couple of years and now I'm back with a similar idea but a bit different:
What we're about to launch is the following: The expert will answer a few free questions, then lock the answer and we email OP to pay to read the full answer.
The key difference here is that the answer is YOUR answer and not another answer for a similar question.
I'm finalizing the Frontend now, I'm expecting to make $500/day out of this feature. I will keep you guys posted about how it goes.
Morocco is a tough market. generally in MENA content should be free and feel free to use our data to advertise.
Also, there is a law in Morocco that prohibits lawyers from running any kind of ads. That's a big L for my business as well.