How to Monetize Your Roku Channel

How To Monetize Your Roku Channel

There are several ways to make money with a Roku channel. This article discusses several popular options we use to help our customers monetize their channels.

Charge a One TIme Purchase Price

A popular way to monetize Roku channels is to charge a one time purchase price. Some channel owners charge as little as 99 cents to purchase their channels. While this will get you channel sales, you may not make enough money to pay for your costs such as the streaming data that you will need to purchase from your video hosting provider. In short, if you are going to offer a one time low cost purchase price, you need to ensure that you are able to make money at this low price point.

You also need to remember, that Roku takes about 20 percent of the money you receive from any purchase. You need to factor this cost of doing business into your channel plans.

Even if you offer the channel at a higher price point, remember that your video streaming provider will charge you progressively more as you add streaming users. We only recommend one time purchase prices for channel owners who have very low data streaming costs.

Charge a Monthly or Yearly Fee

Roku allows you to charge monthly fees, quarterly fees and yearly fees for your channel. Roku also offers you the ability to have free trials in your channel. A yearly or monthly fee is often the best option for monetizing your channel through subscriptions. The fee allows you to multiply your reimbursement as your channel grows. The fees also help pay for the streaming costs you will incur from your video streaming provider. A good price point for a monthly subscription is $4.99 per month.

It is good to remember that your customer needs to feel that they are getting value from the monthly fee. Our custom channels offer a “Subscribe to our Free Email List” option that allows your subscribers to submit their emails to you. This allows you to keep in touch with your customers via email.

Alternately, we can also build your channel so that it automatically adds new subscribers to your email list. This is a very helpful way to keep in touch with you users and build your channel loyalty.

Show Ads in Your Channel

Another way to monetize your channel is to show video ads. Roku as well as many third party ad brokers will pay you to show ads in your channel. However you will need to show thousands of ads each day in order to support your channel using this system. Ad brokers only pay per thousands ads that are watched per day. For instance, if you play four thousand ads per day at $8 per thousand ads, you would make $32 per day. Read more about playing ads in your Roku channel with our "Advertising Ready Roku Channel Package."

If you channel qualifies, you can partner directly with Roku and make money playing ads in your channel. Roku however, is very selective about the channels they approve for this program. However, if your channel is chose, you can make 70% of the ad revenue that Roku places in your channel. If you channel is chosen by Roku, you can make a lot of money partnering with their advertising network. We usually recommend that our customers start off playing ads from a few third party ad brokers, while they wait to see if Roku wants to place ads directly in their channel. That way your channel is monetized from the beginning.

You can make more money if you sell your ad space directly, however this requires direct sales. If you have contacts in businesses that buy national ads, you will make more money selling your ads directly to these businesses.

Our channel management software allows you to have a mixture of ads you sell yourself, and ads from an ad broker on your channel.

Roku does not allow you to both charge a subscription fee for your channel and show ads to the viewers at the same time. All ad supported channels must be free for viewers to watch and download. However, we have recently created a hybrid channel pakage, that allows viewers to either watch your channel for free with ads, or take out a paid subscription and watch without ads. We found that this type of package is acceptable to Roku. Contact us for more information.

A Product Placement Channel

Finally, you can support your channel by placing products in your videos. However, you are not able to directly sell these products in the videos themselves by pointing viewers to another website. Roku does not allow this.

Rather, you need to simply place the product in your video and then show it during the course of your show. You can show the logo brand and other features of the product.

Companies will pay you to place their products in your videos if you have a large following. This can be a very good way to monetize your channel.

Remember, that there are many ways to monetize your Roku channel. You can make good money with a Roku channel. If you would like to learn more about how we help customers successfully monetize their channels, contact us today. We will be happy to help you create a Roku channel that is successfully monetized.

We offer three ways to help you monetize your channel. The easiest way is to Purchase Our Channel Monetization Service. This full service option is the quickest and best way to start the process. Secondly you can Purchase Our Course to Build and Monetize Your Roku Channel. If you need more customized assistance, we recommend Schedule a Custom Channel Monetization Consultation.

Please contact us for a "no obligation" consultation on your Roku development needs. Also check out our own Channel Monetization Service, where we directly help you monetize your channel and provide ongoing management software and service. We are friendly and happy to help with your project.