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Can you make money online through editorial content? In a series of videos filmed last year at UCA Farnham, Chris Marling explains how broadband comparison site Broadband Genie achieves £1 million in annual revenue through clever use of SEO and targeted consumer editorial content.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86zLGUemjs0
The Broadband Genie business model
The Broadband Genie web site makes all the profit for the company (it also has smaller sites, including Office Genie.

• 150,000 unique visits a month
  [UPDATE: rose to 250,000 after the video was shot, as BBG amalgamated another site, adding a lot of traffic in the process. Plus the site had a few really good months news-wise, thanks to Apple.]

This doesn’t sound like a massive number – but it’s more than enough if you run your website properly.

“Overall annual revenue is projected to be £1m – there’s a lot of money available if you do the internet properly”

The model is referral-based advertising – visitors click through to links and a cookie is dropped on their computer; if a visitor buys anything from that site within 30 days, without going via anyone else’s referral link in the meantime, Broadband Genie gets the money.
These transactions can be anything from a tiny 3 dongle that might only generate £5 in affiliate fees to a big Sky package – buying all this online can generate £200-£300.
The beauty is Broadband Genie is not a retailer, so it doesn’t have to deal with customers direct.

“People see comparison sites like us as a kind of Carphone Warehouse – wide boys who try to sell you a phone because they know they’re going to get the most profit out of it. That’s not what we do – we send you through to the actual person. You’re not buying from us – you’re buying from, say, O2, and you get O2’s customer service.”

Income breakdown:

• 75% – referrals
• 20-25% – banner advertising
• Around 5% – Google Adsense revenue

“When I started at BBG I couldn’t believe how easy it was to get those tenancies. I come from a B2B publishing company where you had an advertising team that was sitting there all day, every day phoning people up saying ‘the next magazine’s out in a month, do you want to buy an advert?’ and the response was ‘no’. They were ending up giving adverts away – selling them for £10 in a monthly magazine. We’ve got these guys ringing us up a month before their tenancy runs out wanting to renew.”

Google Adsense revenue comes from sponsored links. Clickthroughs on sponsored links get a tiny fraction of 1p in revenue – but when you’ve got them all over a very big website with a lot of content, that adds up.
Broadband Genie has same revenue model as other familiar comparison sites: Kelkoo, Compare the Market, Confused.com. But Broadband Genie does it with editorial, which makes it stand out.

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