It's all so very easy to say that you can quickly make a buck a day on the internet. "Sure, just throw together some videos of puppies and put some adsense on there" but that's not the reality of the net today.
People and companies are heavily competing on every freaking keyword that anybody might be interested in. That doesn't mean there isn't opportunities, but it's a much longer haul than just brainstorming an idea and creating a simple web site.
Note that in that list there are several sites that have millions of pageviews per month (a success by most standards), and in spite of that the monetization simply sucks.
If you were to spread those millions of pageviews across many smaller sites the maintenance headache would be a multiple of what it is right now and you'd still not make more than roughly $1000 / month.
If I lost all the $1 per day sites from the list (or lower) there would be only 5 sites left.
"Andrew: When did you have that big leap, from making just a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to actually making substantial money? Was there a month that you actually took that big leap?
Interviewee: Yeah, so when we moved away from Google AdSense to other ad partners, because I just stuck the AdSense code on there just to be generating something. I really didn't know anything about ads, or CPM or CTR, or whatever. I generally knew what it was, but when we started getting into higher quality advertisers, that's when the saw the revenue it creates." [1]
I don't know anything about monetizing by ads but I took this to mean that there are other, more profitable places to sell ads than AdSense, presumably based on some volume of clearly targeted, well characterized traffic.
So Jaques, if you have millions of pageviews per month, could you transition from AdSense to whatever it is Noah Everett is referring to? If not, why not?
The thing that has held me back to date is the number of ad networks that are used to serve up malware, or that redirect the traffic or serve unauthorized pop-ups that's something that I'm fairly sure would never happen with google.
edit: Ok, I'm going to do this a bit more structurally, if you have an advertising network you want benchmarked please add it to this thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1108677
thanks!
I run maintain a blog for a friend for whom one page ranks highly for a particular keyword gaining her about 100 thousand pv's a month. We sold an ad on that page for about £150 a month. Yes they over pay. But with a million page views you could easily make more.
For one single keyword it would be worth selling ads direct, selling inventory for a large range of keywords direct is a major headache. That sounds like real work ;)
For example, I suddenly need to know a lot about tax because with my sudden increase in income I don't know what to do. I would easily pay $50 for a tax-for-dummies who make above $10k a month book. It's a small niche, but it is valuable.
Or healthcare. For sick people, this topic is very important. If there is something that offers me good value for this, I will pay for it.
I am asthmatic, for example. There are very few software out there to help asthmatics.
Don't do the adworse nonsense of years ago. Do tiny projects that help people or solve peoples problems and it will be easy to make your dollar.
For instance, while working in tax law for a number of years, I created an annotated Google Custom Search Engine for my own research purposes.
As evidence that it's an under-served niche, the website where it's published was cited by a UCalifornia Law Library and a number of other related websites as a useful resource for tax research purposes.
Besides adsense, how would you generate income for this?
You have the terms people are searching for, just match a book to the term and offer to sell to them. Something like that, but I have no idea about the market.
From your post above: I don't really know how ads work, so I've never actually used them.
Huh? Which one is true?
The reason I said maintenance is important is because the game is 'moving on' all the time. So, whatever you make today that will make you your $1/day will not continue to do so for a long time. You'll be in a new ratrace, but one of your own making. The one where you will have to replace old stuff with new stuff fast enough to make up for the churn.
The $50 tax-for-dummies book sounds like a great plan, but it would take a man-year or more to write that book before you'd pay $50 for it.
It had better not be a small niche then!
How could software help asthmatics ?
The 'adworse nonsense' is still the easiest way to monetize 'tiny' things.
You need to design your projects right and since you know you don't have time to waste, you need to design in an ever-green manner. Don't do things that will flame for a month and burn out - maintainance every 6 months should be the aim.
For asthmatics for example, we need to track lung capacity (there is something you get given that gives you this info when you blow in), and we need to keep track of the spray so it does not finish. Additionally, there are certain excercise one should do to improve lung capacity (like running). If I made such a simple tracker as a start (daily vs capacity), I could start selling this quickly.
I could then use the same tracker as a weight tracker. Or study tracker. Stuff like that. So the new projects are just offshoots of the original project.
http://www.iphonefootprint.com/2008/09/health-information-tr...
I can't find a web version of it off hand, so let's say it doesn't exist yet and you are now going to build it to prove this method works ?
You'd have to keep track of your time to calculate your hourly wage, that would be an interesting experiment.
I'm really curious how that will work out.