After trying to use Amazon as a drop shipper stopped working, I turned my attention to the other way to make money online: advertising. Unlike affliate programs where the user actually has to buy something for you to make money, advertising just requires the user click the ad. Sometimes even less, they just have to load a page with an ad on it. Before you start thinking about commiting click fraud, keep in mind there are systems in place to make sure the clicks or views are legit.

While running the high traffic amazon affilate stores, I had ads in addition to the products for sale. About $20 a day came in from just the ads. The best part about that $20 was: no returns! All the product revenue might not be "real" but no one returned their ad clicks. And it sure seemed easier to get someone to just click vs. take out their credit card and buy. I registered the domain teavee.com and made a site where people could vote for their favorite TV shows. Ads from Google's adsense were all over the site, so I would make money if enough people used the site. But this was 2006 and hosting options were different back then. There was no Google App Engine. It was a constant struggle to keep the costs of the servers well below the revenue coming in from ads. At one point I had six dedicated servers from godaddy at $100 a month each.

After building the site I did a simple SEO trick. I made the name of each TV show appear in the URL. So, for example "American Idol" was www.teavee.com/american-idol. This is very common today, but in 2005/2006 it got yahoo to index my site and send me tons of traffic from people searching for TV shows. Once people started voting and teavee was taking off, I sent out a press release and got a request for a radio interview! The interview below was from May 7, 2006:

At the high point revenue was around $2,400 a month. But the most frustating part of the experience was constantly trying to improve the sites or expand on the idea and only succeeding in reducing revenue. I made sister sites moosak.com (music voting), and others (actors, sports, politics, pets, etc.) The pets one was very popular for a while. People who own pet rats got rats to the #1 position. But they would often complain that the ads on the rats page were for rat poison and how to kill rats. But I had no control over the ads. You can see how the sites worked in this video:

Slowly but surely the revenue went down to zero and I wasn't willing to pay for the hosting anymore. Now that Google App Engine is around and hosting is free, I've been meaning to re-create the sites. A lesson learned might be once you get a system in place making $2,400 a month, be very careful about changing anything. Was teavee a fluke and the traffic was destined to go to zero anyway? Or were my changes to the sites what drove people away? The world may never know.