Slashdot Mirror
Make Money Fast Online
A story in a magazine for dead-tree newspaper editors notes that many of the internet operations established in conjunction with newspapers are actually making money. Interesting stuff. Note that they're not making money from banner ads, but from classified ads.
Yeah dudes, I got this killer email today telling me how I can set up my own internet marketing company and make some phat cash. All I gotta do is send a dollar to the 5 people on the list, move my name up on to the list, and then send it 2 five new people to keep the chain going.
"Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire" --Robert Frost
I get mail about this several times per day...
somebody using the 'net to profit off the content creators rather than the viewers. Sounds like they're being paid for for exposure rather than the content posting itself. Well done, I say!
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Note that they're not making money from banner ads, but from classified ads
Does this mean that Slashdot is going to start a new Classifieds section?
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
Nothing quite like checking out your anime tentacle rape on your cell phone in the subway to Tokyo.
Am I supposed to register for the NYTimes or not?
... I get my Aussie news from smh.com.au and the other day after reading the news I decided to go see what the car market was like for Sport Coupes. I was very impressed by drive.com.au - it makes decent use of web connected databases and hypertext to provide a service that dead-tree cannot (quick comparisons, searches, specifications, web reviews, etc). It makes the shopping "experience" so much easier I can see why it is popular enough to be profitable.
BTW - the careers classifieds are quite good as well if you are in Australia and looking for a job (professional).
- HeXa
1) Porn (yeah, not pr0n, I actually typed "it".)
2) Classified.
Put the two together and you have a cash cow. Idiotic sarcasim aside (which is hard for me to do) has this been done? Do any legal brothels (Nevada?) have web pages that take some form of e-commerce? What mixes are there of pr0n and classifieds... I bet they all make money.
Hey your topic is the same as the last spam I got! :)
How hard is it to find out where a Harvard professor lives? But I could make a lot of money selling _that_ address!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
SWGM, 29, Seeking big fat hairy GNU hippie for Taco Snotting, Scat, anal hijinks. I need your stinky love rod in my ass. Email malda@slashdot.org
Sleep, that's where I'm a Viking!
This lies at the heart of the internet hype.
Just provide time tested needs and services then the profits will follow.
Site slowing, screen clattering pop-unders will not do the trick.
These faggots are driving me crazy with their OS X this and Debian that. I need real news. When will LNUX be dropped from the NASDAQ?
You forgot "selling Viagra on-line."
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
Oh great, slashdot editors published spam by accident. How about the new icon? :)
Imagine creating a service people were willing to pay for, and then charging a reasonable price that is profitable!
Too bad nobody ever said this in 1998...
"Derp de derp."
Isn't this sort of thing covered by ebay and other auction sites? Unless its real estate or something location based, it seems that online classifieds are fighting a losing battle.
One(1) new or good condition fuzzy mascot. Will accept Tux or CowboyNeal figures (only if you haven't chewed on them, though!).
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
We partnered with a local print paper, http://adpak.org, to provide web services to their clients. This works out great for our company, http://cfwebworks.com, and theirs. They utilize exisiting sales reps. to sell our services, and in turn they get a small percentage of each project. The print paper is not taxed with a learning/working a new technology, yet they can still profit from it. It's great for us because it has helped us to gain visibility in the local market.
Newspapers are places people traditionally go for information (news..on paper...hence the name!). Logically, they automatically have a userbase (their readership) as soon as they 'take the leap' to online publishing/features. Classified ads are something people expect from a newspaper: they're used to them, and its no suprise that this can make them successful online.
:p)
According to the article, most of the successful newspaper websites treat their online portion as an extension of their print version (i.e. allowing people to 'upgrade' their classified ad to be posted online as well for an additional fee...at least thats how I read it.)
The significance people place on these 'profitable websites' is misplaced: the reson they are successful is because they have, for the most part, a solid backing in PRINT. However, those sites that attempt to do something different and are still successful bear examination. (i'll leave this as an exercise for the reader
I believe that this success is not true internet success: it comes from their ties to print media and the name recognition that comes with that.
Already done
you forgot gambling.
I belong to a sports gambling forum that charges an ungodly amount like 13 bucks a clickthrough for its ads.
Its far more lucrative than porn, cause there is no "greenguys link-o-rama" for gamblers. I mean sure, you can play "yahoo slots", but that isn't quite the same in relation to gambling as free porn is to well, pay porn.
On a TV show called 'Life Support' we have here in Australia, they put forward a really good way to make money off the internet.
Basically, what you do is set up a website with some pictures of yourself as a 6 year old. All the pedaphiles will begin to email you and want to meet you.
Once you've reeled in a pedaphile, write back saying "My parents don't love me. They won't by me a Playstation 2. How will I know you love me?".
At this point, Mr. Pedaphile will send you a playstation 2 so that you'll meet him. You then sell the new playstation2 on Ebay.
Another up-side is that the pedaphiles usually send you a CD full of hard core porn. You'll be the envy of all your sick-friends with the collection you'll make.
I'm a web developer for a major, regional newspaper and I see it on a regular basis. There is interest in advertising online amongst advertisers. The real problem is getting sales reps out of the mode that print is the only way to go. The few reps who take an interest in selling online get almost immediate results. We've watched reps reluctantly go off to sell online and come back stunned by the response (however, the nature of a sales rep's job makes it easy to forget that); other reps claim that they spend all their time convincing advertisers that print is the way to go, and can't dilute that message by bringing online sales into it (and if that sounds like an excuse... well....)
The problem isn't limited to sales reps. Others (and I am not kidding about this) think the Internet is a "fad." I've heard that term kicked around by many people in the newspaper business. Watching people put the Internet in the same category as hula hoops or pet rocks gives me a real sense of what we're up against. Some of our reporters and editors express resentment in "giving our work away for free" online.
It's a frustrating experience, but from my perspective, the core problem is changing the way people think, particularly those who have the power to guide these kinds of things to profitability.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Garply
Don't tell me its hosted by Vlad.
When paper newspapers did classifieds, was that not the same result? I thought newspapers made quite a bit of money from classifieds, hence why every newspaper has them. And the Toronto Saturday Star is TONS FILLED with them.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
some1 quick.. go to a public library and sign his e-mail up with all the porn (or as some of you refer to it as, "pr0n") newsletters you can think of! oh, and also go to every magazine site and have them send him a "free" issue to each address!
;)
LoL It's not tracable, and my public library doesn't have internet.
Just one idea on how to have fun with his info!
If it's actually true info, that is
Erutangis ym si siht.
This almost seems to suggest that there's more money in extending current business models than there is in inventing brand-new, unproven, arrogrant business models based on the sheer genius of second-year-in-the-real-world-MBA's.
Who would have thought? First people bring porn online and make good money, now people bring classifieds online and make money. Next thing you know, there'll be online auction sites! Wow, there's lots of money to be made by charging for valuable content! Who would've thought?
Why is it so surprising that "Give us $15 and we'll run your classified ad online" makes money, while "Give us nothing while we establish market share by giving away our content, or, if we start to lose money, give us nothing while we download weird spyware that crashes your machine, or, failing that, give us nothing but please look at our flash 12.0 ads that only require a 4MB download, or maybe give us nothing while we figure out what new direction to take our business in" companies are failing left and right. Is it really that hard to figure out?
Perceived value = real value. Simple as that.
Cheers
-b
i am SWM seeking ANAL (please no HIV)
"Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit- it is not
Are you a fucking moron? i'm just asking.. Anyone who uses 'some1' and 'lol' must truly be a fucking idiot. Does it really take that much time to type out Someone? As for LOL, you'd never say "Laugh Out Loud", so why would you ever abbreviate it?
This is how the cost for the telephone books can be (at least partly) covered, and if it works for them, why not websites?
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
I just so happen to be developing a classified ad software product. If you're interested in adding classified ads to your website, take a look at http://www.liquidmarkets.com/?name=liquidclassifie ds and http://www.liquidmarkets.com/?name=XForum&file=vie wthread&tid=55
Sig: Free classified ads at
matchmaker type sites seem to be doing well
You might check the classified section of Fark.com. Although it has its share of standard, flashy web ads, it has a classified section which shows text links along the right column of the page.
Though it's not necessarily all about porn, a good deal of the classified listings are "boobies" related. Further, such ads make the site much more money as the pricing structure is $25 for normal ads and $100 for 'Not Safe For Work' ads.
I'm sure it wasn't a magic bullet for them, however. They had the classified section in long before they started throwing in the annoying flashing ads. In fact, I think you can still go through their farkives and see the site design regress to earlier versions as you do so. Or there's always the Internet Archive
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Note that they're not making money from banner ads, but from classified ads.
The question though. Are they happy about it?
What do I mean? Classifieds are THE most profitable part of dead-tree newspapers. A major reason newspapers WENT online is because they feared their classified business would be stolen by web sites. Hopefully--and I say this because I READ newspapers and Web sites--the demand for classifieds can support both.
[Disclaimer: Newspaper Association of America Slashdotted so I didn't read the article]
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I've been to some crappy clubs, and whenever the DJ just plays one song to the next with no beatmatching or transitions we'd call him DJ Winamp Playlist. Wedding "DJs" do this.
it made me laugh.
Shoving Big Fucking Ads in peoples' faces doesn't work, but allowing them to voluntarily view ads for things which they actually want does. Who would've thunk it? Certainly not Slashdot.
[posting anonymous to avoid karma whoring and self-promotion]
./ programmers could figure out their own system for themselves. The major problem is getting the newspapers to take the medium seriously. Your average daily newspaper does a huge amount of classifieds sales and even if you charged something ludicrously small like 0.50 extra to move each ad online, you could still make a couple of thousand extra per day. Run it using a system like mine (linux box, postgresql, not too crazy server needs) and you pretty much net what you gross.
I'd been developing a PHP online classifieds system for a while and pretty much have it done (just need to incorporate an existing search engine from another project and get importing from XML working), specifically as a portfolio piece. It's easy enough to do that probably most
Now, they already are doing online classifieds and for some newspapers the system is up and running and looking good. You can even browse across chains of newspapers (friggin' media cartels) to get all sorts of ads. But, when you do, what you get listed back to you is pretty sparse. This suggests they're content to keep the push in print. This might make sense, because classifieds are a major revenue generator for a newspaper, and you don't suddenly want to offer an online classifieds system priced so well that it disrupts the print classifieds.
Small newspapers that don't have a whole lot of money to spend is going to think of online classifieds as copying and pasting out of a Quark page -- quick enough to get the job done but hardly very impressive. The end result is pretty ugly, non-searchable, and usually archived by page instead of by ad. This suggests they don't think the Internet is worth the extra effort needed.
Note that they're not making money from banner ads, but from classified ads.
I'm sorry, I'm not at liberty to divulge the actual nature of the ads themselves, since they're classifi*WHACK*
Ow! That really hurt! I mean, no, really, who throws a shoe?!
Welcome to the InterNet generation. "LOL" as an acronym actually makes sense to the author. I attribute it to too much time spent on IRC. In a medium where an ampersand can consume more space than "and", abbreviations save little and merely create confusion.
Jakob Nielsen has been saying for almost five years that newspapers will have to use classified ads, not banner ads to make money.
A better model just moves the local paper online entirely.
As someone who used to read the Washington Post on Fridays for the estate and garage sale ads, I must say it's nice to be able to do a word search on particular items of interest rather than read through every single little line set in 3-point type.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
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While waiting for the slashdotted article to be reprinted somewhere, here's something on the same subject
For what it's worth I wrote an article about
Web Communities and the Art of Making Money .
I analyze the same issues.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Good to hear they actually figured out that demographics dictate that the print version will become unviable in a decade.
Online news - customizable news sources, filtering of unwanted news (e.g., OJ Simpson, Anne Nicolle Smith, Bill Clinton, and other lamers)
And even though they're dirt simple -- no need to pay salaries for journalists, editors, illustrators & other creative talent -- a huge fraction of a paper's regular readers will spend lots of time poring over the daily classified ads. In other words, they're not just a big source of income, they're also a small expense.
If marketers are just waking up to this now, they've been asleep at the wheel for years.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL