MonetizeMore Update: How We Grew Revenue 118% This Year
This is a follow up story for MonetizeMore. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 5 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
I’m the Founder & CEO of MonetizeMore. I started MonetizeMore in 2010 to build a bootstrap business that would dramatically increase ad revenues for publishers.
MonetizeMore provides ad technology to large Google AdSense websites. Publishers who monetize their audience via display ads can either outsource their ad operations so that one of MonetizeMore’s ad optimization teams will handle all their ad optimization tactics, execution, and strategy.
If publishers prefer to keep their ad operations in-house, they could use PubGuru (The Hootsuite of the ad technology industry) to get access to powerful ad technology to boost ad revenue performance and optimize via an easy-to-use platform while still getting full reporting transparency and maintain full ownership of their ad inventory. MonetizeMore developed PubGuru to complement any in-house ad operations team. Overall, MonetizeMore offers the complete solution for publishers that prefer to outsource ad operations or ones that prefer to keep them in-house.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
I feel very grateful to say despite the pandemic, MonetizeMore has been accelerating in growth. In 2020 YoY growth was 70%. So far in 2021, we’ve seen 118% YoY growth. To be able to handle this growth, our global remote team has grown to 190 team members.
The biggest reason for our recent growth has been the launch of PubGuru at the end of 2019. PubGuru has enabled MonetizeMore to offer more value to our publishers.
If you’re struggling to find success or come up with an idea, then listen to this podcast religiously! They present so many stellar ideas and have a pragmatic approach to growth that applies to most businesses.
Instead of viewing their revenue stats via a Google Sheet, they could see their consolidated revenue stats within the PubGuru Platform that offers:
- Customized reports
- Revenue, cost, and profit attribution to traffic sources
- Smart notifications of errors and opportunities within publisher ad inventories
- Reports that detect Google policy violations and how to fix them
Traffic Cop was also launched around the same time as PubGuru. This is a tool that detects and blocks bot traffic. If Google detects significant bot traffic on an ad monetized publisher, they will ban their AdSense/AdX account and revoke all unpaid ad revenues. Unfortunately, we’ve seen many publisher businesses die because of these horrible incidents. That’s why we decided to build a machine learning-driven technology that would prevent the largest threat to ad monetized pubs. Traffic Cop has proven to be an important complementary offering that has become a significant revenue driver as well.
Our free PubGuru Ad Inspector Chrome Extension has become a great source of new leads and has increased awareness of the PubGuru offering. Despite it only being relevant to large ad monetized publishers, it has been downloaded 1000s of times and has received rave reviews. We have found the leads have been easier to convert because the Chrome Extension has delivered so much value and the publishers know exactly what they need Monetizemore fix.
Youtube marketing has been a greater focus for MonetizeMore lately as well. We’ve found that our Youtube leads are disproportionately higher quality versus other marketing channels. As a result, we’ve been creating more video content and we also hired a video producer to improve the quality of the videos.
Overall, many reasons have led to our accumulated growth over the past year. However, product improvements have been the biggest multiplier. Our focus on customer feedback to fix issues and provide our customers more value has improved sales conversion rates, reduced churn, increased referred customers, and created a positive flywheel effect for MonetizeMore.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
There have been times where I questioned whether my expectations of our team members are too high. I have realized that these high expectations are an important ingredient to scaling as a company. It’s the A-players that rise to these high expectations. As a leader, I need to fuel the growth of the A-players rather than lower my expectations to team members who can’t rise to the occasion.
I’ve learned about the importance of feedback loops in practice. We use three different NPS surveys that we use to improve our products. Now that the Engineering Dept and Product Team have bought in and are analyzing each piece of feedback and coming up with solutions for each issue to improve our products, we’ve seen improvements in user engagement, word of mouth, churn, and marketability. It’s one thing to have product feedback surveys, it’s another to actually put them into action.
I’ve seen the incredible opportunity that exists in developing markets like LATAM and South Asia. We have hired dedicated teams for some of these markets that understand the cultural intricacies of these countries. That has made a huge difference in terms of successfully penetrating these markets. I have learned that hiring local salespeople is key to successfully entering a new market.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
We have plans to release several new features to the PubGuru Platform:
- Translate PubGuru into Portuguese and Spanish
- Page Report : Attribute revenue per web page
- Floor Price Report: Provides data to optimize floor prices
- Ad Setup Policy Violation Reports: Detect and fix violations that cause advertisers to blacklist publisher domains
- Ad Network Receivables Platform: Help publishers easily account for all the ad network payments they receive each month
- PubGuru Enterprise Analytics: Big data platform customized to the publisher’s needs
We plan to surpass $100M in Yearly Gross Revenues by the end of 2022. In five years, we plan on achieving a 25% market share of the top 1000 ad monetized publishers. To achieve these goals, we need to continue to improve PubGuru to be the no-brainer tool for any large ad monetized publisher. We will focus on improving our enterprise sales to become one of the best in our industry.
Have you read any good books in the last year?
Traffic Secrets was a very useful read. We have since implemented the Dream 1000 project, implemented story-based marketing, and several marketing channel-specific tactics. Many of the recommendations were reminders from the previous books but there were several new gold nuggets.
By far, my favorite business podcast is My First Million. They are head and shoulders above the rest. Sam and Shaan’s business insights are so useful and have applied to my business. They also get my entrepreneurship juices flowing which gets me excited to work on MonetizeMore. I have already recommended many entrepreneurs listen to their podcasts. You can thank me later.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
I don’t want to sound like a broken record but listen to My First Million. If you’re struggling to find success or come up with an idea, then listen to this podcast religiously! They present so many stellar ideas and have a pragmatic approach to growth that applies to most businesses.
I find many struggling entrepreneurs are in their own way. They don’t think big enough, they don’t listen to their customers, they avoid doing what they really should be doing and they tend to get into comfortable routines that led them nowhere in the first place. If it’s not working change it up!
All entrepreneurs should focus on iteration for everything they do. Ask yourself, what is the MVP version of what you’re creating? You want to get feedback on what you’re creating as quickly as possible. It doesn’t matter how productive you are if you’re working in the wrong direction. Feedback on what you’re creating verifies if you’re going in the right direction. Do not disappear to build “the big reveal” months later. That usually leads to a giant disappointment. That goes for creating products, projects, books, or even small things like blog posts.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We are hiring for a Product Manager. This will be a great opportunity for someone who wants to have a great impact on products that empower ad monetized publishers.
The role will be very challenging, the hours will be long, the product is complex, there is a lot of industry ambiguity but if successful, you will have a direct hand in sculpting a product that is currently one of the fastest-growing and to be the first choice of the top publishers in the World.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
