[Steve]

I've seen and heard of quite a few sites that are making okay money from sites. But I don't know of too many that are making a decent sum of money just from advertising revenue? This market has kind of taken a hit. Can any one proove me wrong? Is a site that sells only ads a worthwhile business to set up?

[mike]

Oh yes sites that do not do anything besides sit there make a ton of money. Look at domain brokers, when they don't sell the domains they put services like all these adds on it, and boom they make money. Some people do that with thousands and thousands of domains.

[Bleys]

Free porn sites probably still make money. But I don't know first hand.

Content sites, like Avault.com, are still making money... but it's a constant uphill battle. If advertising is your only source of revenue, you make it a lot harder on yourself to turn a profit. But it can be done. Especially with the success of new advertising methods, like AdSense.

[mike]

Key domains (i. e. forums.com, pretty.com, etc.) just make their money from adds, and offer no real services besides they just sit there. That is what a lot of domain brokers do.

[Steve]

Originally posted by mike
Key domains (i. e. forums.com, pretty.com, etc.) just make their money from adds, and offer no real services besides they just sit there. That is what a lot of domain brokers do.

But if Forums.com or Pretty.com was developed into a real product wouldn't the money they produce go up exponentially?

I know a couple of guys making okay money off of advertising, but they need to produce a lot of banner views to make money. I have some sites that sell a product and I make over $1 per session.

[mike]

I personally do not know, mainly because I do not own a key domain like forums.com. I doubt it, because some things (like misspellings) do pretty well just with adds. I would think it would do better just sitting there with adds.

[ChrisB]

You mean "ads" right?

It is very possible to make money with advertising and affiliate programs.

The reason you hear so much about businesses depending on such revenue failing is that these are large corporate websites. If you have to pay for corporate overhead then you'll have a hard time making a profit from only ads.

On the other hand if your site is run by a single person or a small group of people in their spare time without overhead costs like office space, secretaries, etc then its very easy to make money from advertising.

It also depends on what type of site you run. A reference site that requires little or no maintenance might bring in $10 a day in advertising for you. Yippee, $10 a day, so what you say right? Well thats $3600 a year -- for doing nothing (after the site is initially built). Meanwhile since you don't need to spend time updating site #1 you start on site #2. This is very similar to investing in real estate. The first property is the hardest, then you use that property as collateral to get a loan for a second property, and so on.

Affiliate revenue also has a bad reputation because so many people simple do not know how to make money from an affiliate program. They might use Amazon.com and put up a couple book links and moan when they only make $2 a quarter. It never occurs to them that those types of links simply may not perform well on their site.

For an affiliate program, or advertising, to perform really well it needs to help the user. If users come to your site to learn about video game cheats then an ad selling a strategy guide would do well since it helps them cheat -- which was their goal in coming to the site in the first place.

If users come to your site to read a video game review and find video game news, your video game strategy guide links may not perform as well since that was not the user's goal in coming to your site. In this case your best bet would be to appeal to the branding & marketing needs of video game makers. People who want to get word of their new game out to current gamers.

Per visitor a content site is going to make much less than an ecommerce site -- but it is exponentially easier to get traffic to a content site than an ecommerce site.

[Matt.Dean]

My recent project, CondoProfiles.com , we decided to try to use an advertising base model instead of charging clients to view the data. Meaning that you could head over to http://www.condoprofiles.com/ and sign up for free and access the data for free while having the banner and link advertisements present. However, if that doesn't pay the bills we may have to charge for access to the site so you'd have to pay to get in. We hope it wouldn't come to that, but........... you never know.

[mike]

Nice site, I like it. Good idea too. If you have the right domain and you can get engough hits you make a ton of money just by sitting there and doing nothing. I know someone who owns 8,000 domains and makes a ton of money by just sitting there.

[Steve]

A lot of sites start on an ad based model and in search for "more revenue" they switch to a Premium model. 15% of internet users pay for traffic and it is expected to move to 40% in 2004.

[melloncollie]

When your website is making revenue purely by advertising it is extremely important that the website creates a strong community (much like this website has successfully done).

In order to build a strong, loyal community the website needs to provide the users with the information that they want, feel that the website is there to serve them and not for them to serve the website and anything that they click on or purchase would be to aid their interests and needs already (not just some random banner selling some random scheme or product).

One needs to know their users and provide them with targeted information that suites them - once this is done and the website has a loyal community following then you will see the revenue from advertising start growing exponentially.

-Mellon