How do people make money on the Web?

This site is the result of my research into how people are using the World Wide Web to make money. I tell you how to do it, how it works, who to contact, how much people are making, and generally anything I have found out about the subject.
Here are some of the questions I have researched: There are two ways people make money on the Internet:
  • They sell things.
  • They help other people sell things.
Selling things involves getting money somehow from the person visiting your site. You need either a credit card or some form of electronic cash, or they need to mail you a payment. Helping someone sell sell things involves getting money from another company when a person visits your site. You can get money for displaying a banner advertisement, or you can get money when the visitor buys something from a site to which you steer them. Examples of the latter method are the various associate programs run by companies that sell books or games on the net. For example, Amazon.com encourages people with Web sites to print book reviews, and contain in the review a link to the Amazon.com site. If the visitor buys the book from Amazon, the Web site owner gets between 5% and 15% of the price of the book. Other on-line bookstores such as Canada's Internet Bookstore and Stuffed Flamingo Publications have similar programs. There are two things to keep in mind about associate programs. One is that you don't make any money unless the visitor buys something from the host company. The other is a bit more subtle. The visitor must buy the product immediately. If the visitor browses around the other site before buying, you will get no credit for the sale. As I find examples, I will add them to my page of associate programs.

How much can I get for putting a banner on my page?

  Advertisers vary in what they pay, but a I have heard numbers in the range of ten cents per 'eyeball'. This means that each time someone goes to a page with the ad, the website makes a dime. For a site with 5,000 hits a day, this would be $500.00 a day, or $182,500.00 per year. Other arrangements only pay when the user clicks on the ad. These generally pay more, but only a small fraction of your visitors will ever click on an ad. Numbers I have been hearing are in the twenty five cents a click range.

How do I find advertisers?

  Sometimes they come to you. The day after my web site hit 5,000 hits, I got the following letter via eMail: 
    Dear Mr./Mrs. Even,

    I visited your website yesterday and came away impressed with your layout
    and content. Hopefully your site is a success and receive a good
    amount of traffic!  With the Link-N-Win Associate Program, there is an easy
    way to make money on this traffic by simply by placing a banner on your
    most visited pages.

    Link-n-Win Associate Program is a referral program created in conjunction
    with the Click-N-Win.com website, a revolutionary new gaming site, where
    you can win real money!   With the Link-N-Win Program you will
    automatically receive 5% of all Click-N-Win game tickets purchased by
    customers that were linked from your website.

    In just 2 minutes you can apply to become a Link-n-Win Associate and start
    earning money!  Please visit 

    http://www.link-n-win.kn 

    See you soon,
    greetings from Nevis, West Indies,

    Stratis International, Inc.
    Jeff P. Wall
The Click-N-Win banner is in my examples section for those interested in how it works, or who want to inflate my bank account. The other way to find advertisers is to call them or eMail them. You might start by looking at ads on sites similar to your own, but there is no harm in finding an advertiser that fits your content, and suggesting an arrangement.

How do my advertisers know how much to pay me?

  Banner ads are not simply pictures on your web site. They are programs on the advertiser's machine that get run when someone visits your site. These programs credit your account and download the picture. In this way, the advertiser has an exact accounting of your site's hit count.
 

How much does it cost to set up a Web page?

  My Internet Service Provider charged me a setup fee of plus another for the custom domain name. They also charge per month. The domain name cost another to register, which must be renewed in two years. Thus the fixed costs are and the variable costs are per month. The entry capital required is . This is for a site that is allowed hits per day, or Megabytes of data. If your page is over Kilobytes in size, you will exceed your data limit before you run out of hits. The 'size' of a site must include the text and images, counted only once, since we can assume that the visitor's browser will be caching the data. This site is currently about bytes, so I can have about hits per day before I am charged extra. This hasn't happened yet.
    This section coming soon.