I was signing up for a Photobucket account the other day, and I was quite surprised by their aggresive attempt to monetize new signups. On the registration screen, you are asked to provide your cell phone number. If you enter your cell phone number, a pre-checked bx appears which reads “Yes, I would like my chance to win a new HDTV or a $500 Starbucks gift card and other great prizes from Bid4Prizes.”

If you keep the box checked, a text message with a “coupon code” will be sent to your phone, and you will be asked to enter your “coupon code” on the next page. If you enter the code, you will be charged $9.99/month to be a member of Bid4Prizes. Bid4Prizes is a cell phone based auction system owned by the same company that operates the popualr mobilesidewalk ringtone affiliate program.

Photobucket is making at least $7.50 per user who enters a coupon code. They are probably making even more based on the significant volume they are driving to the offer. Considering the relatively young demographic of Photobucket’s users, I am sure that they are generating a ton of signups, and there are probably some surprised parents out there looking at cell phone charges from Bid4Prizes. According to the May Photobucket newseltter, they are registering 85,000 new users per day. If the offer converts at 1% of new users, they are generating over $2.2 million dollars in revenue per year from the offer.

This monetization strategy is very aggressive, and it will be interesting to see how long Photobucket maintains the practice.

Some of the details of the .cm domain name monetization scheme have been revealed since my last post on .cm domain names.  Business 2.0 ran a great article about what is going on with the .cm domain space. In my initial post, I detailed how nearly all .cm domain names were being redirected to a landing page on agoga.com that features ppc links from yahoo. The redirects and landing pages are managed by uber-domainer Kevin Ham. He has worked out an agreement with the government of Cameroon to share the revenues derived from the landing pages.

The .cm landing pages receive roughly 8 million uniqe visitors per month. In my initial post, I mentioned that whoever was behind the .cm domain redirect was leaving money on the table by not customizing the landing pages based on the domain entered. According to the article, all of the domains point to the same landing page in order to provide some defense against accusations of typo-squatting. By Mr. Ham’s logic, the service is not typo-squatting, but simply a redirection where all domains are treated equally. The article is a great peak into the world of domaining, and I highly recommend checking it out.

In the comments of my last post, someone mentioned Rightway Gate, a company that claims to be able to register .cm domain names.  I gave them a call last week.  They claimed that if you could provide proof of a trademark or other intellectual property, they would work with the Carmeron domain registry to get you the domain. I am not sure if the service is legitimate, but it is something to explore if you are desperate.

Social Networking site Tagged is going through explosive growth, and they have  an interesting growth and monetization strategy. Last week, a techcrunch profile mentioned that they are signing up 350,000 new users per day and generating 1 billion page views per month.  The site’s monthly revenue is $600k per month.

The first thing that sparked my interest was how on earth they could maintain such a rapid rate of new user acquisition.  During their signup process, they slyly ask users to import their address book to invite friends to the site. The friend invitations are some of the slickest that I have seen.  You can see some screenshots and a full writeup of the process here. I have read that they send out the invite multiple times. Apparently, this strategy has been very effective for them.

On the monetization side, they have done a good job of developing multiple revenue streams. They make money from:

• Email Marketing Opt-In at Registration (via postmasterdirect)
• Banners
• Search Agreement with Ask Jeeves. The techcrunch article says that most of their revenue is derived from the search agreement.
• Intellitxt. On all of their profile pages, certain keywords are highlighted and if a user hovers over them, they will be presented with ads from intellitext.
• Ringtones. They have some text links to ringtone CPA offers. With the size of their teen audience, they should make a killing on ringtones.
• Sale of Downloadable Games. They offer paid downloads of full versions of games such as bejeweled. Game downloads are probably not a huge revenue stream for them, but I like the diversification.
• They insert “targeted text ads” into the emails and site messages user s send. They are using a Adknowledge to provide the ads. I am curious how well the ads are actually targeted.

With their level of traffic, Tagged has a huge revenue opportunity. To further improve their monetization, I would pursue:

• Developing in the sponsorship/direct promotion area (think myspace). On their employment page, they are hiring some ad executives which should help with this.
• Promoting targeted CPA offers. Ringtones are a good start, but they could expand to education and other targeted offers.
• Market Research. Market researches would pay up ($4-$8/survey) for access to their userbase.

With such explosive growth, Tagged will be a good company to keep an eye on for the next few months.  In my next post, I will cover an aggressive monetizaton tactic of a site with a similar demographic.