Not selling anything, just an information website. Is it possible?

probably from advertising if it gets popular, but apart from that im not too sure

You have to be selling something – even if its only the advertising space.

Remember content is king – what would be unique about your content?
You need an awful lot of daily hits to make a living.
Other than that it has to offer a service.

You could sell services relevant to the content of the website. A lot of open source projects have something similar; give away the software but run some sort of agency on the back of the popularity of what you give away. For an example, see the relationship between http://drupal.org and http://acquia.com

Rachel

You have to be selling something – even if its only the advertising space.

Hence Wikipedia begging for money.

Wikipedia don’t really need to do the begging either.

You could always sell access to the content? Folk like Bike James and Lee Likes Bikes have plenty of free content, but also sell e-books, “programs” and dead trees.

My wife makes a pretty decent living off of her website, which started out as information but now also does retail.

A friend of mine makes a decent living from his website. You log on to it to check your broadband speed. They then link to various ‘speed up your PC’ things and get the money from referrals.

Someone I know through twitter runs a specialist insurance industry news and analysis website. He makes his living through that and, as a result of his knowledge, does consultancy and speaks at conferences.

Yes, but you either need a massive number of hits or a high value brand (which dictates the advertising rates). Realistically you need both.

If you take your clothes off probably not…

An ex lodger of mine owns and runs http://www.home.co.uk/

Not sure how much he makes from it…

Oh yes, I used to work for a company that did online classifieds across a number of vertical markets.

130 sites

40 million page impressions a month.

they did ok.

An ex lodger of mine owns and runs http://www.home.co.uk/

Not sure how much he makes from it…

http://companycheck.co.uk/company/03982774

Enough to live on it seems.

I was thinking of setting up a listings site for music and musicians in Edinburgh – list gigs, clubs, venues, practice rooms, have a bit for musician wanted ads etc Let people put on reviews like Trip Advisor

Initially plan on having advertising on it, but if it builds up well then to sell premium listings to venues or club nights on a monthly subscription.

No idea how well it work out, and limiting myself to Edinburgh is bad (smaller range of possible customers/users) and good (more specific/less competition)

Youtube channel?
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/bedroom-gamer-joseph-garrett-making-3210608

YGH, the biggest problem with that is that Facebook exists. For people who aren’t really into the music scene will get most info from Facebook. People who are into it are likely already using ReverbNation.

Saying that an ultra localised site could get some traction if it had good content (gig write-ups/photos, rehearsal studio info, pubs/clubs/promoters booking info etc.). It’d be a lot of work, but would be a good resource. Once you have written the site, you could franchise it out to other cities too.

Not selling anything, just an information website. Is it possible?

Depends on the definition of “information website”.

E.g. I know a few full time bloggers. Or journalists, depending how snobbish you feel 😉

You make a living by getting either page/video views (for ads), which requires massive traffic. So you need compelling content regularly updated.

Or slightly differently, referrer links like the wirecutter does for amazon. But it’s just a slightly different ad model.

Yeah, I know what you mean.
I’m going to do it anyway since it interests me – I love music and there is no central place for finding out about in Edinburgh.

If I can make a bunch of cash off it, so much the better!

YGH,

You’re also up against dealing with some of the poorest and non-business-minded people in the western world 🙂 Do it for the love. I know people who have tried similar things and it sounds like hard work. I get the feeling that they end up feeling like ‘the man’ trying to extort cash out of hard-up artists and musicians.

Not saying all musicians are hard up, just the good ones.

Be more aiming to get money from the venues etc.
I know musicians too well.

Just an idea I’m mulling over, not finished thinking about it yet.

Interesting anecdote time then. I used to work at a company and knew a project manager there. He was ex-army, not bad as a PM and a nice enough guy.

Out of the blue, a friend of his who had been trying to get a website up and running, decided he couldn’t be bothered and offered him the site for free. The site advertised sex toys, lingerie, dvd’s, anything to do with sex. Now the guy didn’t have to go home and start packing dildos up when he got home, that was handled by another company. All he did was decide what would be advertised on the site and tell the developer what it was. He needed to keep an eye no the industry as it were and see what was popular. he did this first by looking at other sites and then by going to sex industry conferences.

Within six months he was making more money from the website than as a PM. Within 18 months he gave up his day job and just spent all his time going to sex toy conferences. The funny thing was, he was very straight laced. He couldn’t understand what people got out of all the stuff he sold, never used any of it himself and saw it just as a good way of earning money. He always knew what the most popular item was on the site out of thousands (invariably one of the massive dildos with things sticking out of it)

I’d provide the link to his site but I can’t remember it at the moment.

samuri – Member
Interesting anecdote time then. I used to work at a company and knew a project manager there. He was ex-army, not bad as a PM and a nice enough guy.

Good on him. Interesting story but I really don’t understand why people insert things up themselves. Funny old world this.

Martin lewis did ok

The chicken and egg if you want to make a living from site content is the content needs to be constantly fresh – the volume of traffic is going to come from people returning frequently. You need to be creating content frequently so that theres always something new to see. In fact there needs to be so much new stuff to see it would be chore to wade through it if you didn’t check in regularly. You need to be creating content all the time, not just in your spare time, which means it needs to be your full time job long before its paying you anything.

Interesting story but I really don’t understand why people insert things up themselves.

Give it a whirl chewkw. You might just have a ‘road to Damascus moment’

💡

❗

😯

😀

It’s hard enough when you have a team of developers, designers and ad sales people backing you up.

I think you’d have to be very talented or have a big untapped market in mind to make money setting up an editorial site from scratch.

The chicken and egg if you want to make a living from site content is the content needs to be constantly fresh – the volume of traffic is going to come from people returning frequently. You need to be creating content frequently so that theres always something new to see. In fact there needs to be so much new stuff to see it would be chore to wade through it if you didn’t check in regularly. You need to be creating content all the time, not just in your spare time, which means it needs to be your full time job long before its paying you anything.

Which is why you get unpaid members of the public to do it, like on a forum or submitting ‘listicles’ on Buzzfeed and Huff Post

Guy I went to school with earns a living running a website that catalogues continuity errors, plot inconsistencies and other mistakes in movies. I think he does reasonably well out of it. As above, the content largely comes from the public.

YouTube has got to be the answer for making ‘relatively’ easy money online?

You do need to think of something that people will watch but the are loads of unfilled niches out there.

Some friends started the Todler Learning Fun channel becuase they could only find videos with American voices/themes/words etc and they wanted something more familiar. They do kids videos such as nursery rhymes, counting, letters etc and make a wage from it.

https://www.youtube.com/user/Toddlerfunlearning/featured

I’ve just looked it up – moviemistakes.com

“This is fun”
Peter Jackson

“It’s kind of fun”
Gore Verbinski

“Don’t you have a job?”
John Landis

🙂