Monetization

Dirstarter offers multiple ways to monetize your directory website. This guide covers the main monetization methods and how to implement them effectively.

Premium Listings

Dirstarter offers three different listing plans. Feel free to experiment with pricing and extra features to find the best fit for your directory.

Upon submitting, the tool is saved as a draft, and users are redirected to the listing plan selection page where they can choose their preferred plan and complete the payment.

If a premium listing is selected, the system notifies administrators to review and activate the submission.

For premium listings, the tool receives automatic featured placement and a do-follow link. When the subscription is canceled, the tool is downgraded to Standard tier through a Stripe webhook integration.

Advertising

Advertising on your directory is powered by Revinel, a hosted ad-serving platform. You don't store ads or build campaigns yourself. Revinel serves them, rotates them, tracks impressions and clicks, and runs the checkout on your /advertise page.

Ads appear in three places out of the box: a banner above every page, cards mixed into the tools listings, and a card in the sidebar of tool and blog pages. When no campaign is booked, a house ad points visitors back to /advertise.

Setup

Sign up through the Dirstarter link, which creates a Revinel workspace with the ad fields below already configured, so you skip the manual setup and its key-matching pitfall. Connect Stripe so advertisers can pay you directly, then copy your workspace id into NEXT_PUBLIC_REVINEL_WORKSPACE_ID. That variable is the master switch: set it and ads turn on, leave it empty and the whole ad surface stays hidden, so your site still builds without a Revinel account.

Client-side ad fetches and tracking route through your own domain (/_proxy/revinel), so ad blockers can't drop them as third-party requests.

Ad fields

The signup link above creates these for you. If you set up a workspace by hand instead, Revinel serves each ad from custom fields you define once, and Dirstarter reads four of them, whose keys must match exactly:

• description (Textarea): the body shown on ad cards
• shortDescription (Text): the one-line copy shown in the banner
• buttonLabel (Text): the call to action, for example "Learn more"
• brandColor (Color): tints the ad card with the advertiser's brand color

Revinel derives a field's key from its display name and then freezes it. Name each field so it produces the exact key above. A field named "CTA label" becomes ctaLabel and won't be read, so the ad falls back to a default label with no way to fix it later.

Placements and pricing

Pricing tiers live in your Revinel workspace and render on /advertise through a hosted embed, so there's no pricing or checkout code in your site. Give higher tiers more weight to win the premium banner slot: config/ads.ts sets premiumWeightThreshold (default 1) as the minimum tier weight eligible for the banner, and adsPerPage for how many cards drop into each listing.

Affiliate Marketing

The easiest way to monetize your directory is to use affiliate links. Dirstarter is built with affiliate marketing in mind.

There's no special setup required. Just add your affiliate links to the directory and see the sales roll in.

Performance Tracking

A great way to track the performance of your affiliate links is to use link shortening services like Dub.

Dub is a link shortening service that allows you to track the performance of your affiliate links. It also allows to share the link analytics with anyone, so can be used to track the click through rate of the ads and other metrics.