1. AdSense

Adsense by google is one way that classified sites make money. On sites where you see ad by google means the site has signed up for adsense and thus makes money via this platform.

2. Advertising Banner

Display has traditionally been an important revenue source for most digital media, but some classifieds offer display in more creative forms. High traffic volumes and users searching on city and category levels make it possible to sell targeted display on geo and interest. Sites like Privateproperty.com sells Banner Ads and that’s a good revenue generation model for them

3. Listings

There are numerous variants of monetizing listings

By number
This means you pay a certain amount to be able to post on this site. Of recent, introduced pay per listing to this Job and property Vertical. To post a property on OlX, you will have to pay the Sum of N500.

By Business
Another dimension instead of by number is charging differently for businesses, which is quite common among the mature sites. This is implemented by sites like Efrtin.com. Its FREE to post one to 5 ads but you are seen as a business when you start posting more than 7 ads per month. As a business, you have to sign up for their Membership. Membership charges in Efritin depends on the category you are operating in. For instance as a car dealer, you might part with close to N12,000 to be a member on Efritin.com

Premium listings
The most common form of way to monetize classifieds used by almost all of the big players Nigerianpropertycentre, OLX, Jiji. Privateproperty, sharedapartments.ng, and others are:
Bumps or premium listing. If you visit any of this sites category and see ads that are highlighted, Bold text or the likes, then you are looking at featured/ Premium listings Time extension or prolonged listing time. This premium listing is a huge revenue generation model for the classified sites. For instance, if 10,000 people subscribe for premium listings at the rate of N1000 per listing, that’s a revenue of N10, 000,000 for that site.


4. Auxiliary Services / Affiliates

A pretty standard setup is to work with related affiliate link on listing pages which may even enhance the user experience and not come across as bought media. Take for instance, on Sharedapartments.ng, if a host pays for insurance to protect his/her properties, the insurance company in return pays Sharedapartment a commission for this.

5. Data
Few marketplaces openly talk about selling data, but especially for strong verticals meta data of prices and trends is quite valuable for banks, insurance companies and other players. Companies like lekki gardens might be interested in getting data of people that have shown interest in buying properties via the privateproperty portal. In this scenario, the site might sell such data at a tangible amount.


6. Move ad to the Top
To move your ad to the top of all listings and keep up there, you would have to top up the ad to and move it to the Top. Keeping it at the Top means that your ad would be amoung the Top ads in the category.

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