Making Money Online Stats.

A interview on techcrunch has brought out a lot of responses from various bloggers.  Scoble mentions my site and talks about the need for others to think outside of the bubble,  do adwords  SEO etc and build things that people will actually use. 

The other comments about the article seem to focus around saying that we are in a bubble and companies are going to crash and burn etc etc etc.

I think there is a little bubble of stupid ideas, and many many people can’t seem to understand that you need to build products for the mass market  not for a bunch of extreme techies that just jump from one thing to the next.

If you have a lot of traffic  you can always monetize it.   The days of  the first bubble are long gone and there are now hundreds of thousands of sites looking to sell stuff online and buying advertising.  

The worst you could possiblely do with an advertising model is make 1 cent a unique visitor per day.

digg.com  800k uniques a day? = $8,000/day from advertising.

If you sell stuff you could of course make well over $1.00 a unique visitor per day.

Quote from the article.

“Paul: What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don’t do that, it won’t matter how clever your business model is.

Of course you have to have a business model eventually. But experience so far suggests that figuring out how to make money from something popular is a lot easier than making something popular. “

In my opinion  if the cost of your operations are 2-3 cents a unique visitor  chances are plain advertising will bring you to profitability.   If your costs are over 10 cents a unique visitor then you will need to sell a product or service  this of course assumes a high traffic site with at least 100k uniques per day.    In about 2 years from now we will probably see a 30-50% decrease in operational costs as hardware and software costs continue to fall.