How to make money on VK?

VK offers a variety of options to make money, both for business and for individuals. Basically there are three main categories of monetization: promoting your own products, promoting other’s products and content monetization. As you know, VK is a Russian social platform, therefore it is essential to have someone, at least a freelancer, who speaks Russian fluently and may help you with some tasks in making money there.

So, from this post you will learn about 8 ways to earn money on VK:

1. Selling your own products or merchandise
2. Affiliate programs
3. VK Market platform
4. VK advertising network
5. Articles monetization
6. Video monetization
7. Ads in the VK apps and games
8. Mutual promotion

Selling your own products or merchandise

The most obvious way to make money on VK, as on every social platform, is to sell your own products or services. If you have a business, you can send traffic to your website or create a fanpage where you can place your products and communicate with potential customers.

If you are a musician or an artist, you can promote your art and also sell merchandise to your fans. Here is an example of such profile:

Here on my blog you can find more information on how to set up your fanpage and advertise it.

Affiliate programs

On the other hand, if you don’t have your own business to earn money on VK, you can use affiliate programs to sell other company’s products.

In Russia there are a lot of affiliate programs which offer a variety of products preferred by Russians: https://partnerkin.com/offer

VK Market platform

Market platform is a VK service which allows to monetize a community by selling promotional posts.

Advertisers in turn can purchase a promotional post in your community using a separate section in VK ad manager:

The market platform is located in the “Monetization” tab in the community. To get access to it, the average daily reach in your community must exceed 7.5K users. To recieve the earnings, you have to register on the SocialCentrum platform.

The significant advantage of Market platform is that it does not require your participation. Just set the cost of advertising, and all applications are accepted and placed automatically.

According to the rules, only 3 direct ads can be placed per day, and 2 ads from the Market platform may bypass this restriction.

VK advertising network

As opposed to the Market platform, VK advertising network shows a relevant ad to every subscriber, depending on his age, locations, interests etc. This ads are embedded in users’ newsfeeds and the posts feed of your community.

You will have the access to VK advertising network in the “Monetization” tab of your community settings only after reaching the average daily reach of 7500 users. And the same as with Market Platform, to recieve the earnings from Advertising Network, you have to register on the SocialCentrum platform.

Notice, that you can’t turn on an ad network just like that. Applications are processed by moderators, and communities are strictly selected. For example, your fanpage must be older than 3 months, be open, topics like adult, politics, religion are prohibited, must not publish illegal content as pirated videos and music, it must not be a commercial fanpage, the content must be original, etc.

Here’s a link to the rules in Russian, using Google Translator you can understand the essence: https://vk.com/page-59800369_53538391

The reach of subscribers is directly related to earnings on the advertising network, since earnings on it are not fixed. Higher reach = more ads impressions = higher earnings. It also depends on your audience, season, day of the week, and demand among advertisers. The average CPM rate is 20 rubles.

VK advertising network is a great tool for passive income and is suitable for those who have small amount of applications from the Market platform and direct promotional posts.

Articles monetization

The ad appears at the end of articles. The author can’t influence the subject of ads — each visitor will see offers that are selected according to their interests.

Only communities that are connected to the VK Advertising network (described above) can monetize articles. The main requirement is to publish at least one article per week.

Create an article and select “Enable monetization” in the “Publish” menu. Now the reader of this article will see the ad. Please note that monetization will remain enabled by default for new publications. You can opt out of it at any time and in any separate article — just select the material, switch to editing mode and uncheck it. Thus, you can choose which materials will contain the ad block and which will not.

Video monetization

If you own a popular video community your can earn money from advertising in videos using the affiliate programs — either offical VK Pladform or other video monetization platforms, like Videoseed or Viboom.com.

The main criteria for signing up to Pladform:

• no unsettled claims by copyright holders;
• no spam and content compliance with the program rules (there can be no adult content, violence, cruelty, extremism, or calls for illegal actions in the community);
• more than 250K subscribers.

If Your community meets the requirements you should register in the Pladform to participate, get an email confirmation and then add one or more of your communities.

Videoseed and Viboom have less stringent requirements:

• 15K followers
• open group
• no spam and prohibited content
• you should give access to your stats

Ads in the VK apps and games

If you are a developer creating apps or mobile games you may be interested in having an additional income from VK. For this purpose you should register in AppsCentrum platform and add your app there.

There are ad formats now, which can be used together or separately:

Rewarded video — users can view a video ad for a reward in the form of a game bonus.
Pre-roll — users view a video ad when the app is launched.

Requirements:

• no unsettled claims by copyright holders;
• no spam and content compliance with the program rules (the app or games can not contain adult content, violence, cruelty, extremism, calls to commit illegal actions, as well as promotion of smoking, alcohol or drugs).

Earned money are credited to your AppsCentrum account within 70 days after the end of the reporting period (month). After receiving money to your account, you can request withdrawal in any convenient way: wire transfer, WebMoney, Yandex.Money, Qiwi, ePayments eWallet. You can specify details for payments, as well as get more detailed information on tariffs and limits in your personal account.

Mutual promotion

And last but not least way to make money on VK is to negotiate directly with the administrators of other communities and advertise each other. If you don’t need an ad in response, take money for advertising at your community. However, VK do not control the integrity of such transactions, so be careful.

Also pay attention to the rules for placing advertising publications and the rules for conducting contests and promotions. All advertising entries that you place directly (bypassing the Market platform) must comply with VK rules.

Revenue depends on how large your community is and how much your partner is willing to offer.

Start communicating with administrators through personal correspondence. Links to managers’ pages are usually found in the “Contacts” section. As an alternative you may contact the administrator through community messages.