One of the nice things about working with such a large cross section of Africa’s online content portals or publishers is that after a while, you begin to notice trends. Sadly, one of these seems to be an across the board trend where amongst both large and small African publishers there is a highly disproportinate over reliance upon Google as a revenue stream.

Why is this a problem?

In theory it makes perfect sense for bloggers, social networks, and news portal sites that attract an African audience to use Google’s Adsense to monetize their content because the Adsense program is very well established, it is very easy to implement, and presents few requirement hurdles for publishers to cross before signing up. So if you are a new publisher this is very nice place to start once you feel that you have reached that traffic threshold where you can no longer afford to not monetize the site. Going to Google is a great move.

However, as a publisher your emphasis should be on building longevity and shoring up your brand. There is really no better way to do this than by fully optimizing your ad revenue. Which means that over time your reliance upon Adsense should diminish as you add more revenue streams that may have been harder to implement in the beginning of your journey as an African publisher.

What are the alternate revenue streams?

A good place to begin understanding the main categories of publisher revenue streams is on a blog that is authored by best selling author-Chris Anderson. Chris Anderson is also the author of a ground breaking New York Times bestseller called The Long Tail.

A few of the ad models that he mentions in addition to the CPM model are licensing, sale of statistical information about users, paid subscriptions, affiliate marketing, and merchandise just to name a few. In the context of Africa’s publishers it is easy to say that if a publisher were only able to follow just one or two of his suggestions; while simultaneously branching out to find other ad networks that pay more than Google then that publisher would be well on their way to tapping into a near endless well of revenue that could withstand many of the economic storms that the global business community is forced to navigate through in this age.