According to Nielsen Online’s AdRelevance (November 2007), email sites are by far the number one generator of ad-revenue (followed by general and national news – a distant second and then portals).

This chart really speaks well to the fact that Grouptivity generates revenue for partners (many of whom are national news publishers) by marrying email-based content sharing with their news content.

Publishers increasingly are looking to ad-supported content as their primary revenue driver, adding more content outside their subscription barriers or doing away with premium content entirely to encourage readership and drive traffic. This strategy makes sense. According to the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, “Internet advertising revenues in the US set a new record of $16.9 billion in 2006”. That’s a 35% gain over 2005! It hit another record of $4.9 billion for the first quarter of 2007, according to the most recent IAB/PWC report, a 26% increase over Q1 2006!

As publisher’s scramble to bolster traffic, many are turning to services like Grouptivity to help them drive more traffic to their sites! I summarized the benefit Grouptivity offers content publisher in a post I did on publisher-centric content sharing:

Grouptivity is a “publisher-centric” web service that provides content publishers with increased traffic and improved SEO by enabling content sharing and discussion on their sites and transforming the sharing activity into “user-generated” content that is readily exposed to search engines and syndication services.  By leveraging an under-used asset, the “Email this Link” button, Grouptivity captures user interest on a publisher’s site, builds a discussion community around it, and then promotes the content based on its popularity. By providing a real-world gauge of what content users are actually sharing, Grouptivity enables content publishers to get real-time visibility into who is sharing what, in addition to traffic and improved monetization.