Having a strategy that diversifies your revenue streams is now a prerequisite in many niches for success. As such, hunting for every opportunity to monetize your content should be a task you fully commit to as soon as you can. One area that’s relatively low-hanging fruit in this regard is your videos.
Video is big business on the internet – quite literally – and because of this, tapping into the earning potential of your videos makes logical sense. The best aspect is that you can do this within WordPress by using a dedicated plugin. Employing the right one makes the whole process smooth, and lets you earn money for the least effort.
In this post, we’ll discuss video monetization a little further, including what it is and why you should do it. Then, we’ll talk about the WP Video Monetize plugin, which lets you make money from your videos by harnessing WordPress’ native technologies. Let’s get started!
Video Monetization: An Introduction
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how to implement video monetization, we should discuss exactly what it is. For the uninitiated, we’re simply talking about the process of earning money from your content, in this case, your videos. Of course, monetization isn’t completely the domain of videos, but there are primarily two specific methods of doing so that are worth talking about further:
- Advertising products during the video, and offering an affiliate link in the description.
- Showing tailored and targeted ads to viewers as your video plays.
You may have seen similar solutions on other ‘tube-style’ sites, and we’ll touch on this a little more in the next section. In our opinion, the latter is preferred for a number of reasons, mainly because it’s a passive way of earning income. What’s more, your video’s content can remain free from ads, while still offering an income generator that is arguably more tailored to your audience.
Why Monetizing Your Videos is a Crucial Step
We’ve already alluded to video monetization being a ‘good thing’, and there are a few reasons why:
- It’s a passive income generator. Firstly, displaying ads on your videos is not a short-term monetary boost – it can be a cornerstone revenue stream. What’s more, ads will be displayed regardless of the age of your content, meaning opportunities for click-throughs are much higher than other monetization methods.
- You own your content and all ad revenue. Unlike uploading videos to your favorite ‘tube-style’ site and enrolling in their ad program, the videos hosted on your site are completely under your control. This is doubly true for the ads you run and offers you more flexibility than playing by the rules of a third-party hosting site.
- Your reputation isn’t affected. There’s an argument that earning through ads removes you personally from the monetization process in the eyes of your visitors. This means your actual content can forgo ‘bumper ads’ and other forms of selling, while still benefitting from the positives.
All in all, video monetization is a great way to earn money, especially if you’re set on hosting your videos on your own website, rather than a third-party. Of course, to do this, you’ll need a suitable solution – let’s take a look at one we favor.
Introducing the WP Video Monetize Plugin
Plugins360 are a team serious about making WordPress’ native video better. For example, their WP Video Enhanced plugin is well worth a look if you’re interested in boosting the functionality of the core WordPress player. Their WP Video Monetize plugin aims to bring ad monetization to your WordPress site.
The plugin is mainly compatible with the native player, although desktop YouTube and Vimeo videos are also supported to a certain extent. Also, you’ll be pleased to know WP Video Monetize supports the DoubleClick for Publishers and Google AdSense networks, along with any VAST-compliant ad server.
What’s more, extensive tests using BrowerStack means WP Video Monetize offers cross-browser compatibility. This is fantastic, as you can practically guarantee that your ads will display perfects, regardless of the end user’s preferences.
Key Features
- Integrates with the native WordPress video player to provide on-ad monetization.
- Offers multiple ad networks, depending on your preferred solution.
- Provides limited support for YouTube and Vimeo videos (desktop only).
- Gives you access to a dedicated Ad Tester, to make sure your ad feeds work as intended.
Price: One year’s support and updates cost $49 for a single domain.
How to Monetize Your WordPress Videos (Using the WP Video Monetize Plugin)
You’d be forgiven for thinking that video monetization would be difficult – after all, something so beneficial shouldn’t be easy to implement. However, we’ll show you just how simple it can be. In fact, you can see this for yourself using Plugins360s dedicated Ad Tester:
This essentially provides a demo page incorporating a preset video. You’ll notice a form to the left where you can place your VAST ad tag, and choose some different settings based on how you’d like to display your videos. Once you click Start Test, your ad stream should display on the embedded video.
At this point, you’re ready to install and activate the plugin itself, then activate your license. To do this, head to the Video Monetize panel within WordPress, and enter the license key you received via email into the relevant field:
Fortunately, once you’ve done this, getting ads onto your videos is straightforward – in fact, that option is already activated. At the bare minimum, you’ll need to add your VAST URL into the appropriate box and save your changes.
From here, you can tweak some of the other settings depending on your requirements. For example, the VPAID mode lets you configure your ‘iframe’, and you can also customize the interval between each ad. Finally, DoubleClick users can also leverage Google Publisher Tags to display companion ads if desired.
There’s more to discover with WP Video Monetize, so we encourage you to look through the easily digestible documentation to see what you can achieve!
Conclusion
Unless you’re completely new to online business, you’ll likely know that finding any and every revenue stream is a necessary step in order to succeed. However, this can be a mammoth task if you’re unsure of a) what to monetize, and b) how to do it.
This post has talked about the merits of video monetization, and more importantly, how to do it using a WordPress plugin. The WP Video Monetize plugin lets you display ads on your videos from a chosen ad network, and what’s more, does so using WordPress’ inherent features. This means it can slot straight into your existing setup and give you the peace of mind that your site will still be as strong as ever.
While finishing this article, we found the Plugins360 Team released the 1.1.0 version of the WP Video Monetize which also supports their Video Posts plugin All-in-One Video Gallery.
Are you excited by the prospects the WP Video Monetize plugin can give you? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below!
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