Forum Moderators: phranque
I really only see three avenues to profitability with such a site:
1: Subscription
2: Managing your own banner ads
3: Donations
I see subscriptions only working if what you have is unique, or not otherwise available for free.
Managing your own banner ads could be a bit of work, you need tech skills, sales skills, and a lot of maintenance
Donations must only work for the most quality sites, because you are fighting human nature.
So, what are you all doing? Or, are you just letting those old site rot on the vine?
This seems to be working for highly specialised BtoB info sites like ours.
We only receive around 3,500 uniques a day measured by Analog (including not counting robots etc), but that is enough for specialised sites to attract advertiers who are targeting certain professional groups.
If, by general you mean lack of focus, then I'd have to say No. Untargeted traffic has been devalued to the point that I see lots of publishers quoting returns of .10 CPM and I think that's a good guage of fair market value of their traffic count. Take a look at all the blogs out there as an example of this class of will-never-make-money site.
On the other hand, with the possible exception of blogs, I find it hard to imagine a site with 10k uniques per day that doesn't have SOME sort of focus.
Whilst we concentrated on introducing fulfillment models (read ecommerce), they got more aggressive in selling exposure on their site!
They claim to get 10k+ a day but the site is bleeding and the lack of development and maintenance is astonishing which tells its own story.
Infact, I am sure that there are loads of these sites out there in the various industries that we operate in dying a slow death.
I think youve covered the problems with Subscription, Managing your own banner ads
and Donations quite nicely.
I believe that unless you have something seriously unique and you continue to invest time into it, its going to be a serious battle to keep these sort of sites going concerns
The great thing about the dot com crash is that companies with less-than-savvy business models have fallen by the wayside and more will continue to do so.
I'm looking forward to that.
Here in the UK there used to be about 50 major movie sites. Yep, 50 - many of them run by amateurs from their bedrooms, many others with backing from enormous multinationals. One by one I've seen these sites close down.
The companies with thirty staff members on enormous salaries and fancy offices finally 'discovered' they couldn't generate enough money. And after a few months the amateurs lose interest in updating their sites.
Now there are only about 20 movie sites left in the UK. As you can see at the Yahoo category, quite of the few which are remaining haven't been updated for months.
I hope Yahoo drop them... then my site will begin to gain market share and sell its advertising space.
It's survival of the fittest. And as I and others predicted years back, only the top two or three will prosper in every sector.
(edited by: NFFC at 6:25 pm (utc) on April 16, 2002)
I though the link had value, because I wanted people to see for themselves that the sites at Yahoo hadn't been updated for years and I wasn't just trying to knock-down our competitors.
If you link to a page that has nearby link pop pointing to your site, then youre promoting your site, either on purpose or by accident
its too hard for the mods to tell so thats why most peeps tend to avoid posting random URL's
perhaps avoiding the [www....] bit you can get away with it in these instances :)
i hope :)
so over time the banners will become fewer and the ones that retain them will slowly see their revenue from ads pick up again.
I agree with mack - the web is a business platform that's just stabilizing for the first time.
I always use J.D. Rockefeller's experiences with the oil industry as an example for how the internet is stabilizing. When he first got into oil, it was a fairly new world market - and like the internet, he made millions because it was the next big industry. It eventually stabilized and because a market where people could conduct business in an old fashioned sense.
The internet now is growing into a business platform that is more in tune with old business. Customer relations are more important than they were 3 years ago. Also, you have to be making profit or at least have potential for revenue to get a reasonable amount of funding. Internet programs that used to work such as banner programs, no longer are viable avenues for income - because the ROI (return on investment) on the part of the ad agencies was never good, but only now does that even matter. They had so much unearned income before from investment that they had a humongous margin for loss.
Now, like in most modern markets where advertising or sponsorship is one of the major avenues for income, the ROI has to be worthwhile. To have secure income in the emerging web economy you have to have something that many prior web companies didn't have: a good business plan.
I think, like any modern organization or business that isn't based on sales, you can forecast your potential in a given market by strategic market and business structure analysis, weighing your incomes against your expenses, and forecasting different market trends based on your research. If a business can do this on paper, then it's a matter of taking what the paper says, and making an effective product that matches the predictions (which shouldn't be impossible if what was put on paper was done conservatively, along with knowledge of what you're talking about.)
I recall my first e-business venture was back in 2000, and when we tried to put together a business plan, we had no idea what we were getting into. If we did understand our market better, then we would've known that we couldn't succeed at the time with what we planned. I think this is a scenario similar to those that lots of companies went through and eventually led to their busts (excluding those that seriously were just destroyed by the market downturn). Those that survived (e.g., Amazon.com)had just or were beginning to formulate a more serious and sound business structure. If I'm not mistaken, Amazon reported their first Quarterly profits this January.
So in conclusion (Whew!) yeah, why not?
