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can FWPs nowadays still make money?

Agum

Agum

New Member
recently it appears that the users of the internet are "ignoring" banner advertisements. Meaning, they will act as if they didn't see anything when an ad comes out -- people just got used to ads that they never click on them anymore. Or at least, MUCH fewer people click on ads nowadays than a year ago. This is happening to all web sites that have ads (maybe except porno).

FWPs are supposed to rely on ads to make a profit... can they even still live? The big ones might, like Geocities, Tripod, XOOM, FortuneCity; but the new ones and the smaller ones probably aren't even making a profit, and thus closing down at any time. For those of you who are considering to start a FWP, take this into account..

due to this reason, I myself would not really risk to start a new free service of any kind now..
 
I dunno, I wouldn't say end of the net, just end of the corporate net. The internet never started with banners, why end with it :p
 
Then what else can be used the make money? I've seen search boxes and targeted text links, but what else is there? I've wanted to open a FWp for a while now, bu keep holding bacl because I don't want to lose money.
 
I think that's possibly the point, igsites. The likes of Geocities/Yahoo, Tripod etc <b>can</b> afford to loose money. They can stand a loss for a while because they have other irons in the fire, or enough dosh behind them to cushion themselves.

Without that, then no, I don't think it's a good idea to start up a FWP.

And of course, money is no guarantee that everything will go smoothly. Go.com is down, yet again and really ticking off their members. No explanations, no apologies, just down. Yet it has Disney behind it. (which probably explains it!)
 
Did you see 60 minutes last night? One guy was predicting that 90% of .coms will go out of business. And that is the big boys who had 50 million plus of investors money to make an idea work. So... there are many great ideas and business' to come on the net but you better have a plan that takes in real money. I don't think banner clicking is the way to do that unless you are really really big. Yahoo big!
 
I posted this a while back on one of the more obscure threads:

It seems like the Free stuff business is somewhat entering an 'internet mall' stage where all things are combined.

If we see yahoo taking over geocities and offering free webspace, webmail, 'search engine' (you know what I mean), shopping mall, ...

NBC is doing pretty much the same with it's http://www.nbci.com

Microsoft is doing pretty much te same... it's just a matter of time before they buy up some FWP.

What they all seem to have in common:

Free webspace
Free webbased email
News
Link directory
Shopping Mall (affiliates)
Software

I think the shopping mall concept is very interesting, also for the smaller FWP's as it gives the ability to make some extra revenue. You already have the online community... it's like bringing the mall to people's homes. You have to face it, once people sign up for your service, they don't really have any more reason to keep visiting the main site... If you offer information, a shopping mall with bargains, etc. You'll have alot more return traffic.
 
The bad thing is it seems that NBCi hasn't put any money into Xoom since they took it over, other than whatever the purchase price was. The service is still really bad, which doesn't look good for a corporate giant such as NBC.
 
Warez is a big reason they can't make money!

I find it hard to believe most FWPs can make a reasonable amount of money. Just ask Spaceports. Before they put the bandwidth cap on their accounts, they were rumored to be losing over $100,000 a month. Know why? Warez baby. You would not believe the extent to which those warez sites abuse the FWPs. A typical warez site uses a script to create tons of accounts and then uploads at least 20 gigs of huge downloadable files. That sucks away terabytes of bandwidth from the FWPs. Ouch!
 
whether u make money or not i think is gonna be equal to how hard u work and how much u really wanna mak emoney and make the shit work
thats my opinion
 
Re: Warez is a big reason they can't make money!

Originally posted by mrpaul
I find it hard to believe most FWPs can make a reasonable amount of money. Just ask Spaceports. Before they put the bandwidth cap on their accounts, they were rumored to be losing over $100,000 a month. Know why? Warez baby. You would not believe the extent to which those warez sites abuse the FWPs. A typical warez site uses a script to create tons of accounts and then uploads at least 20 gigs of huge downloadable files. That sucks away terabytes of bandwidth from the FWPs. Ouch!
Click to expand...

You have some good points but your facts are also mixed up. Spaceports projected that without the bandwidth cap, they could lose $100,000 in the next *year* not per month.
 
I think a small one person FWP, if ran right and targeting the right people, should be able to at least show some positive gains ($200/wk?). My plan has always been to rent a dirt cheap server, although good (4webspace.com). Have a small staff (me), and target all the sites to a specific area. Signup would be through e-mail, that way I don't have people signing up for accounts by themselves and storing all kinds of shit on my server. However, the question remains: How to make money? Banner ads probaly won't cut it.
 
actually, i'm getting inbetween 1-2% clickthru... so much for ignoring banners... Weird though how the more traffic i have the more the clickthru goes down... oh well
 
I personaly think that ad banners will drop lower and only be used for branding and close targeting.

The rest of the money is going to be in affiliate sales, when someone is actually making money. Selling products and making a 15% commisson etc.

Along with search engines who use this to their advantage (GoTo.com), now all the major players are doing this...
  • GoTo powers AOL Netfind (Netscape), Lycos (HotBot etc) and AltaVista is joining soon.
  • Direct Hit and Ask Jeeves use a variation, and power many searchengines!
  • Google does their own selling.

Notice how Yahoo!, NBCi and MSN have all the above? Along with community features to keep the visitors.

I don't think it's the banner ads that are the big picture.
 
Making money from a FWP is actualy pretty easy.. just like any other free service on the net!

Signup to x-drive, notice all the optins?

now signup to Datablocks.net :) Notice somthing similar?

If you want to start a FWP and dont know how to make money with it, and or dont have the know-how or resources, contact me @ jmayor@datablocks.net

I am co-branding datablocks!

Datablocks will pay you $1 USD for each signup your co-brand gets.. :) You will also be able to send out a weekly newsletter to your users with your own ads in it.. :)

there is money to be made! just have to know where to look! :)

John
 
I know 9ug.com gets most of their cash from search links on their website and not ads. So there is other sources of income.

Also opt in email is big with fwp's they can pay a return of $2-5 a year per email address if you get the right rep company. few hundred people signup your set. They make a killing off opt in email. We don't currently have opt in email on our website but we are thinking about it.
 
if your fwh id say stay the hell away from banners, you can get a $1 cpm or whatever, but text links get a way higher click through, went from making $100 a day to making over $500
 
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