I was chatting with a few folks who made the pitch last Friday and it seems a lot of people think selling ads is the only way to make money.
While Google probably made close to $100m in Singapore selling advertising alone, I still think citing pure advertising as a form of monetization is an extremely bad idea.
Advertising is an extremely crowded space. Search engines are doing it, news portals are doing it, forums are doing it, social networks are doing it, so where do you stand in this crowd, especially if you’re a new startup?
Instead of looking to sell advertisements for money, think of how you can monetize your strengths such as selling a service or selling data and statistics for market intelligence, or even being acquired by another company.
Think about it…
March 8, 2010 at 1:41 pm
imho, advertising is a great way to earn money. I agree with Hong Jun that it’s all in the ad placement, and how you actually help advertise the products. Traffic definitely helps, but it’s how you can convince the advertiser that you are conveying their message effectively to that traffic. Just putting a random, unrelated ad on a populsr page, for example, is the most basic, and probably not the most effective. In a game, there are a lot more opportunities to be creative with ad placement, and I think we should not undermine it’s use. It is a great way to earn money, if you can find/there is a way to a way to integrate it.
Of course, advertising is not a primary means of income, although it can be extremely lucrative. It is good if you can churn out something people are willing to pay for at the same time even if they don’t need it. I like reading forums of some apps, were people discuss things like “Will you pay for…” Because some of the most useless stuff, like cute avatars/items DO tempt many people. They just want to possess those items on the spur of the moment.
March 2, 2010 at 10:58 am
I have been running with advertising for about four years now.
From experience: advertising pays peanuts.
I have only made 400 US dollars over the past three-four years or so. Most of this money goes back into webhosting and bandwidth.
It’s enough to break even, but it’s absolutely useless for a business model. Which is kinda sad, yes.
March 1, 2010 at 2:24 am
Advertising always comes to people’s mind when they have a great idea but they don’t know how to monetize them. This is because advertisements can be placed at almost any site and application. But how useful is it? We don’t know..
February 28, 2010 at 7:50 pm
Absolutely right. A lot of students think that once they have traffic to their site, they will make money.
Sometimes it’s true. Most times it’s bogus.
Eyeballs are pretty cheap…. at least if you sell them through Google AdWords. Some keywords are worth a lot, but Google pockets most of the markup and the content owners get scraps.
People have to learn to think DIFFERENT. 🙂