Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Could a Website be Profitable without Selling Anything?  How feasible is having a website which offers free information.  Please correct me if I am wrong, right now I am thinking that if I create a website which will draw a lot of hits, it could potentially be very profitable (via advertisers, etc.) ex. facebook.  What do you guys think?       

This is proven by many websites such us Web 2.0 communities.  Just take a look at Fliker, YouTube, Digg, even Yahoo and Google.

You just need good idea, good contents and a lot of audience and advertisers would line up quickly.


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Goran Paunovic
Creative Director

ArtVersion.com
One Northfield Plaza
Suite 300
Northfield, IL 60093

Yes, it is entirely possible but like ArtVersion points out, you need the right concept.  And you need a strong business plan.

There are many blogs that are very profitable without selling anything.

If you have the visitors and traffic to your site, you can monetize those visitors without directly selling anything to them. Like the others have mentioned, you can advertise.

I have two content sites that a very profitable by simply running Google Adsense and Text Link Ads. The key to advertising earnings is to have a site that people actually want to visit and find valuable. If you have visitors that like your site, odds are there are advertisers that want to market to them.

Of course if your site is really attractive, you can recruit sponsors directly and skip the middle man like Adsense.


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Joe Rawlinson
Texadero - Web Marketing and Development
Family Says - Your private family website made easy!

All very good points. The only other thing I would throw in there would be what do you consider a success to be?

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china business card / Wall Street Journal Reader

The generation of a comfortable stream of income first and formost, closley followed by providing the public with a wealth of information which will enable them to save time and money at no cost to them.

I don`t mean to be a contrarian, but...

Flickr, YouTube and Digg are all losing money. As are 99% of all web 2.0 companies that only offer free web services. For those companies, the strategy is to get bought before the cash dries up.

People do make money from advertising - on blogs, forums, game sites, etc. You can go over to problogger.com for more info on that. But it`s something that has to be hard-won.




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