generating income on free sites that provide a service

[Jayman911]

I posted a question yesterday regarding this topic but it got put on hold pending review for some reason. I'm not sure what i did wrong as i am new here. I suspect it was because in my question i sited a couple of example websites and perhaps that is percieved as a violation of this forum?!?

Anyway i'll try to cautiously describe my question again. Firstly, i'm not even sure i am in the right forum for this so if not please excuse me. I see a number of websites that offer some kind of service - for example Polling sites. They allow you to setup a poll and host that poll on your own site, and all of the statistics and administration of the poll remain on the Polling website. Almost all of the polling websites i come across offer their service for 'free'. I am perplexed by this as i don't see how a company can offer something for free and sustain itself. They must be generating income somehow?!? I thought perhaps paid advertisements but thats not the case with this example (polling sites). There are also numerous other examples of sites i can site that do this as well but i don't see how they generate an income.

Does anyone have any input on this? Am i posting this in the right forum?

Jay

[wrgvt]

I've seen something similar with other web site services, not polling sites, so I'm not sure it's the same thing. Do these sites offer paid services too?

I've seen sites that offer free services for limited use, which small webmasters often use. For larger sites that would comsume more of its resources, they have a paid "professional" service that fits their needs. Why do they let the small fry use it for free?

- The small web sites could someday be big web sites.

- The small web sites might be forced to post an image that helps brand their services

- The small web sites might be forced to link back (often with the branding image) back to their site, which helps with traffic and search engine rankings.

- The small web sites might be forced to run ads on the displays that come from the services site, which generates revenue for the services company

[Jayman911]

They don't seem to offer paid services - that i can tell. Of course in the example i've sited SOME of these 'polling' sites seem to be owned by a 'survey' site that does offer a paid service. Though the two are on a separate website and don't seem to be advertising the fact that they are related to each other.

I like your point about links on the small site being forced to post a link or an image branding the larger site's services, and thus driving up internet traffic and search engine rankings. This seems to make sense, however some of the sites i'm referring to just don't seem to have any visible source of income. So it would seem that even though they are getting alot of traffic and alot of people using their free service, how are they getting paid?

Strange.

Jay

[dickbaker]

Perhaps he has some affiliate links buried in the text of some of his pages.

I came across a rather large (1000+ pages) authority site on a popular subject. The owner of the site had written many extensive pages of content. The site has been around since 1998.

But I didn't see any ads, and I wondered how he could afford to do all that work for free.

Then I saw links to affiliates buried in nearly every one of his articles.

Nice way to construct an affiliate site that doesn't look like an affiliate site.

[onlineleben]

Nice way to construct an affiliate site that doesn't look like an affiliate site

Dick, that's the way to do it. The affiliate does the pre-selling, and the merchant does the hard sale.