Searching for ad revenue

Wired:What does it take to make money on the internet? I wish I knew the answer: in the last month, I've managed to make a grand total of $10 (€7.35) on the internet. On the other hand, other website producers doing the same as me earn as much as $300,000 over the same period, with hardly more resources. They may, I suppose, have something else going for them, writes Danny O'Brien.

We both have Google Adsense, the search engine companies' advertising program. Since its launch in 2003, Adsense ads have appeared on hundreds of thousands of websites: they're the "ads by Google" text boxes your eyes have probably learned to filter out from your favourite sites.

Setting up ads on your own website - even if it's a blog only your mother could love (or ever read) - is straightforward. You stick a little bit of magic incantation provided by Google into the HTML code of your site, give the search engine your bank details, and they'll deliver you a cut of the proceeds they get from ads your users click on.

The downside is that your cut of Google's billions usually measures in the pennies per click and only three or less in a hundred of visitors will ever be tempted by the ads. For obscure tastes like myself, which amount to only a few hundred readers per day, the money adds up to practically nothing.

I've been receiving about $100 from Google on average every two years, but others have better business sense than I and, even though they are hardly more than single person operators, they have lifted themselves into the high life.

Take PlentyOfFish.com, the Canadian dating site whose sole proprietor, Markus Frind, pulls in more than $300,000 of advertising sales a month.

Digg.com, a site that lets geeks vote on the most interesting news on the web has struggled with a reputation for being low-brow - but its creator, Kevin Rose, pulled in more than $250,000 a month in ad revenue.

What do these sites have that I lack? We can talk about good design and compelling content, but the real difference is this: web page impressions.

Frind's site may not look much, but it gets 13 million hits a month and 1.2 million unique visitors in the US alone (it's big in its home of Canada and in Britain too). Rose's site draws millions of techies into its maw, several times a day.

A cloud of marketing speak has descended on the idea of getting lots of people to visit your site, but if you're getting money from ads, it's the best way to turn that $10 a month into something more reasonable.

The good news is anyone can do it: the slide from a nowhere site to an incredibly popular site is relatively frictionless and, if your idea is simple enough, you don't need much computing power to serve millions.

The bad news is it depends as much on luck as hard work. The less work you want to put in, the more you have to rely on being lucky. Frind claims to work only two hours a day on the site, but PlentyOfFish was lucky enough to bubble to the top of the free dating sites in Canada.

Rose's site is a demanding one, both in software and keeping abreast of his mercurial audience's needs: within a year of launching, Digg needed 12 employees and 75 servers. If Rose was lucky, it was in his previous career as a techie television presenter, which gave him the seed audience to start Digg. Other than that, it's all hard work and long hours.

If I was going to pack in journalism and make my dollars online, I'd copy Matt Howie. Howie has earned a tidy living from a blog about digital video recorders, and a community site, Metafilter. He doesn't make millions as far as I know, but his sites provide enough income for him to do nothing else.

He's also started a blog at http://fortuito.us/, where he's documenting what he's learnt to become a businessman online. If you're considering doing the same, it'd be a fine place to start.