I have a friend who runs a portal with relatively respectable traffic (1,000 visitors a day on average). His site is dedicated to a small town in France. He regularly wonders what business model to put in place to monetize his site, without relying solely on Google Ads, which barely covers his hosting costs.
The deceptively good idea that everyone immediately suggests to him (myself included), especially for a city portal, is of course to develop the famous “virtual storefronts” where the town’s retailers can advertise promotions, special offers, and other new products. The only problem is that, after several years of trying with the aforementioned prospects, he has never managed to get them to spend even 10 euros a month on such a service. You could rightly tell me that retailers are tight with their money. True, but that does not stop them from paying much more for an advertisement in the local classifieds paper, in black and white and lost in the middle of a full page of ads.
Paying for the Internet means paying for thin air
So the problem comes from the Internet. Paying for something virtual still seems hard to accept, whereas with a newspaper that leaves real ink stains on your fingers, you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth.
So when I got a call from this client, who wanted to relaunch her portal aimed at retailers and craftspeople in the wellness sector, I had a bit of trouble hiding my pessimism about the future of the project. I did not know it, but her site has been running for 4 years. And off I went into a masterful demonstration of the risks inherent in her project, which combined all the ingredients of a flop: user-generated content only, no online sales, a business target not particularly keen a priori, low stakes (products with low unit value and a regional geographical reach), overall coherence hard to find… After a few minutes of digression, she eventually tells me that the portal is live: 2 years of development, thousands of euros invested, an incalculable amount of time spent. And, to top it all off, a service provider who took advantage of it to charge her top dollar for building an in-house CMS tailored to the project (renamed for the occasion Extranet, it sounds better and it makes it harder for the client to stumble across Plone or Drupal when searching than with the word CMS). I’m not even talking about the cleanliness of the code, which prevents any proper indexing by search engines. As for knowing the site’s traffic, mystery… nobody tracks it, I didn’t find the faintest trace of a script on the page. The texts are in image format, the navigation is frozen for life, the php and html files cross paths and look nothing alike. A collection of everything that must be avoided at all costs.
Bottom line: the ship is sinking as expected.
And then comes the fatal question: should it be stopped or continued? Is it “salvageable”? Would it have been better to invest from the outset in a CMS like Plone and spend the money saved on SEO and partnerships? That’s not even certain.
Internet marketing: a real profession
The problem runs deeper, and the answer can be summed up in two words: Internet marketing. A profession even younger than marketing, which itself is not a very recent field, in a wonderful world where, as recently as 30 years ago, demand was stronger than supply. A profession that everyone thinks they can do, because making money on the Internet is easy, everyone knows that. You can lounge around in the Seychelles while an automated system takes in money while you sleep, as TV reports on internet stars so clearly show. Except that in this case, the system is set up backward: it pays out constantly, and not by a small amount.
Something to think carefully about before venturing onto the web, and above all, do not hesitate to call on internet specialists rather than the marketing manager of the local industrial company.
As for entrusting this type of project directly to programmers…
