I have seen examples of bad business, shady jerks and great content with no sellable angle on these forums.

How will you pull it off?

(moderators, I may have taken a few liberties here. I only want this to become a more relevant forum. I hope you understand this.)

[This message has been edited by doodle (edited 05-22-2001).]

Thanks for your speedy response.

I agree that business practices have to tighten up, although I think that we've already moved a considerable way towards this. Customer service is the key.

I do not agree that we have moved anywhere near tightened business practices, and I think you will find the buyers (ad buyers) today will agree. At least as far as smaller sites go.

Customer service is key? Ok. How will you or anyone else address this?

[This message has been edited by doodle (edited 05-22-2001).]

If there's one thing the net offers that TV and radio don't it's targeting, it's time to start using this. The most successful sites out there are targeted, not general audience, and the search engines probably (I'm guessing here) make most of their money from the searches that produce targeted ads.

As an advertising buyer I would never pay a high CPM for targetting when I can buy low low CPMs for RON. The numbers are simply not there.

it took me over 2 years to at least partly figure it out.

1. Find out what your users want
2. Give it to them straight
3. Earn a little something in the process

My 50,000+/- pageviews a month is making me over $500.00 a month on a 50 meg hosted site and it's not even connected with some ad agency.

When I finally quit my job, I'll write a book on how I did it [just kidding ], can't complain.

quote:

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If there's one thing the net offers that TV and radio don't it's targeting, it's time to start using this.

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When I'm watching a sports channel, most often sports-related commercials are displayed. If my brother is watching cartoons, it's most often toy commercials. When I listen to the radio, I hear ads which are related to the 'type' of music, or 'type' of crowd that listens to that music. As far as I'm concerned, T.V. and Radio ads are targetted and that's what they have over online advertising.

When I go to a website, the owner of that site doesn't know if Im 15, or 70, if I'm female or male. You may say the same for T.V. and Radio, I agree but they have been around alot longer and they know their audience. It'll be a matter of time before online advertising 'knows' it's audience and in alot of cases they do.

Ravi

Everyone caught the question about "what is an invoice?" No disrespect to the asker, but these are some of the basics of business that the survivors must know, along with cash flow management, accounting (ugh), and especially ....

Marketing!

How do you learn all this stuff? There's tons of resources on the web for small businesses along with books and magazines.

Therefore ... in a nutshell....
Start thinking of yourself as a small business first, and not a webmaster who does business.

For example, I do website design, but I think of, and position myself as, a marketer who builds websites.

Ad networks have their disadvantages, but they also have tehir advantages.

At the same time as you're saying ad networks won't work, you're seemingly saying you wouldn't not buy from them.

Targeting and new technologies should in theory be the next big thing. Whether that's the way the market moves or not is anyone's guess. Granted, when you consider companies like Coke, targeting goes out the window.

[This message has been edited by SSacobie (edited 05-23-2001).]

We had the freeskills free training website and relied heavily on advertising, we were also a major casualty of the eFront saga, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue / monies owed and losing out on the infamous lack of share options.

We rebranded the site beginners.co.uk as it was decided that we were going to charge users for the content on an annual membership fee. We decided a name of FREEskills would be a difficult name to charge for the content.

We had no choice as our course providers were pulling out, we had one last attempt and that was through charging users for the access, without this we would be another dot com dropout.

We had a lot of very harsh comments from users of the free training who demanded we return "their" free training, however once we explained the situation and how it was do or die, how we had rescued the site from eFront and how hard we had worked to ensure the content survived, we started turned angry netizens into customers. We improved their learning process and will continue to do so and this has convinced people to use our new site.

We still have free tutorials on the site, in fact over 300 tutorials are free, however they tend to provide enough information to lead into the pay side of the site, the free tutorials still carry banner ads.

We still sell adverts and last month did a deal for 200,000 ads over 2 months at approx $12 CPM, however the resulting extra page impressions get about $0.30 cpm which makes any business difficult.

We launched the new site on Friday last week and have been overwhelmed with support, signups and corporate deals etc, we also found out who our real customers were including public libraries, training companies and individuals.

I know this business model of charging for content does not fit every site, however it has so far proved a very rewarding success for us and anyone with a site that offers depth of content that is of great value to the visitors should consider it. We will always keep a balance between free and membership content as without the free it is always difficult to attract visitors without spending money.

Hope our experience helps.

While I don't think I'd necessarily start a new site with the idea of being advertiser supported, I do think that advertiser supported content will succeed in the long run. But I think it's going to be a lot more intrusive than it is now. The larger ad sizes and multi-media interstitials will become increasingly common. When this happens I wonder if people will be willing to pay to remove the advertising. Pay the site I mean and not some ad blocking software.

I think we're at a key point in time for the small independant publisher. There are still chances to stake out your niche and grow your audience. With hard work and some good ideas we can turn our sites into major players. It seems to me that in the near future (1 - 2 years out) the major players will be so well defined that it'll be hard to break in without spending big bucks.

I can't control the advertising climate and while I can pursue other ways to make money in the short term, I think my time right now is best spent developing my site and trying to build my brand. Of course I started from day one with the idea of keeping expenses low and therefore I can make a small profit even in these times.

Now, I'll agree that when I watch Animal Planet I see mostly ads targeted to animal owners, but not everyone that watches Animal Planet is an animal owner. I watched it long before I ever had a dog. Radio just doesn't fit in my opinion, at least not for the stations I listen to. I generally listen to the "alternative" stations and I hear people calling in that are in their teens or are in their thirties, and either have no job at all or have completely different types of jobs. My point here is, for sites like mine with a really targeted audience, I think there will be ad networks in the future that can pay high rates to their publishers, and the general audience sites will never have this opportunity. If you go to goto.com and search for "MCSE" you'll see clicks paid at over $4. That's INSANE. Then go to goto.com and search for "celebrities" and see the top search paid at $.15 per click.

If there was an easy way to cut out the middle man in every purchase situation on the internet it would be great. Forget affiliate programs, etc. Sell your own products. Whether it be physical products or you find a way to sell your content.

All you heard for the past year or two is... oh, damn, this services is free? How do they make money? Well, from advertising... well you can't quite do that anymore because most of the time expenses bare the brount of any revenue.

People need to start thinking carefully what they budget their money to also. I mean, if you are offering a free service then your options are limited as your return on investment is strictly advertising revenue.

Sure, "free" drives visitors but find a way to capitalize on a similar pay product that accents the free content once they are at your site. And don't do affiliate products... find a way to build your own product. That way you get all monies for a purchase and not 5%. The gains for setting up merchant accounts, etc. in the long run far outway only ever using affiliate sales.

I know i know, not everyone can develop software, or sell things retail... but be creative... e-books are a good idea and aren't very complicated. Plus you can sell ad space in the e-book as well.

Free content is ok if and only if there is not much overhead and the site is mostly self contained.

These companies like NBC and others kill me coming in and spending huge amounts of money to buy a free service site. Oh well, we see what happens when the ad market goes to hell.

Always have a backup plan...

It's still possible to make money from advertising, even if it's much less appealing than it was before (though it'll grow back into its own as the year goes on and into next year).

The issue with internal e-commerce is: has any large e-commerce venture ever been profitable? Sure, when you keep it small, you've got a shot, but there are concerns with growth.