Correct me if I'm wrong...

[gold2platinum]

...but aren't there better ways of getting paid beside Adwords? Unless you are lucky enough to have thousands of one word domains you aren't going to make any coin at all from AdSense. Wouldn't it be better for us "newbs" to develop sites and then try to pick up individual advertisers? Seems to me that would be an easier way of making money for those of us who are late to the game.

[snoopy]

Generally to get an individual advertiser interested in direct advertising it is going to take some pretty healthly traffic flow/potential revenue. For someone just starting out I don't really see it as realistic.

[gold2platinum]

I see a lot of "don't", "can't", "won't", and "not" around here. Can someone tell me any postive reasons for wanting to develop?

[levelonewords]

Originally posted by snoopy
Generally to get an individual advertiser interested in direct advertising it is going to take some pretty healthly traffic flow/potential revenue. For someone just starting out I don't really see it as realistic.

Its even more unrealistic for a newb to get / afford enough PPC type names to live off parking or Google imo.

[gold2platinum]

Also, from what I have read in some places, if you get too many clicks on your ads you get booted out of Adsense anyway.

For instance, if Google notices too many clicks within the same geographic location it is not cool. Well if your domains are geographic locations then obviously most of your hits will be within the same geographic location.

[warsteiner21]

Originally posted by gold2platinum
...but aren't there better ways of getting paid beside Adwords? Unless you are lucky enough to have thousands of one word domains you aren't going to make any coin at all from AdSense. Wouldn't it be better for us "newbs" to develop sites and then try to pick up individual advertisers? Seems to me that would be an easier way of making money for those of us who are late to the game.

Can definitely be done - as Snoopy said, you need to generate enough traffic to make it a worthwhile proposal for a direct advertiser, but with the right development and SEO you can do it without the 'killer' domain - the domain would just make it easier for you - both for ranking and offline marketing.
The toughest part of this model though is ad sales - even with the best site with the most traffic in a certain niche, you still have to go out and make the sales.

[levelonewords]

Originally posted by gold2platinum
I see a lot of "don't", "can't", "won't", and "not" around here. Can someone tell me any postive reasons for wanting to develop?

Yes. But I'm more than likely in the minority here.

I think there is a trend that is allowing new web development to be profitable. That is the slow death spiral of traditional media. Advertisers spend fortunes on Newspapers, TV, Radio and Magazines. All those media are contracting - some, like newspapers, are in a free fall. Classifieds once accounted for 60% of their revenue. CraigsList and Local Geo domains are killing that stream off. Newspapers won't even let you unsubscribe anymore - they give the papers away now.

The LA Times just announced they are shuttering their Real Estate section - others will follow. Even the most potent US paper is on the rocks:

"New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, January, 2007 was asked the following:

“Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?”

His answer:

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,”

The following excerpts are from a rare interview Sulzberger gave to Eytan Avriel of Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel:

Sulzberger says the New York Times is on a journey that will conclude the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will mark the end of the transition. It’s a long journey, and there will be bumps on the road, says the man at the driving wheel, but he doesn’t see a black void ahead.

The New York Times recently merged its print and online news desks. Did it go smoothly, or were there ruffled feathers? Which team is leading the way today?

“You know what a newspaper’s news desk is like? It’s like the emergency room at a hospital, or an office in the military. Both organizations are very goal-oriented, and both are very hard to change,” Sulzberger says.

Once change begins, it happens quickly, so the transition was difficult, he says. “But once the journalists rasped the concept, they flipped and embraced it, and supported the move.” That included veteran managers, too.

“We live in the Internet world. We have, for example, five people working in a special development unit whose only job is to initiate and develop things related to the electronic world - Internet, cellular, whatever comes.

In the age of bloggers, what is the future of online newspapers and the profession in general? There are millions of bloggers out there, and if the Times forgets who and what they are, it will lose the war, and rightly so, according to Sulzberger. “We are curators, curators of news. People don’t click onto the New York Times to read blogs. They want reliable news that they can trust,” he says.

“We aren’t ignoring what’s happening. We understand that the newspaper is not the focal point of city life as it was 10 years ago.

“Once upon a time, people had to read the paper to find out what was going on in theater. Today there are hundreds of forums and sites with that information,” he says. “But the paper can integrate material from bloggers and external writers. We need to be part of that community and to have dialogue with the online world.”

http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/?p=3605

Advertisers are tripping over themselves to find alternate means to communicate - and its almost all on the web. I believe that nicely developed geo - targeted websites that focus on areas like Real Estate, Tourism, Rentals, Classifieds and the like are making money and have even brighter futures.

But this is really operating a business not domaining.

JMHO

[trader]

It's extremely difficult to market and sell ads on your websites. The problem is individual advertisers fail to appreciate the value of highly targeted traffic if on the low side. All they seem to appreciate is very high traffic, even if non-targeted. When I tell them 100 keyword targeted visits is usually better quality for them than say 1,000 untargeted thay act bewildered by it and often say they prefer the 1,000 vs the 100.

[gold2platinum]

Originally posted by levelonewords


But this is really operating a business not domaining.

JMHO

Yes, and the business model is definitely more attractive to me. That's kind of my point for this thread, that I believe "domaining" is only valuable for a few and developing is the real way to go these days.

Of course I'm talking real development and not a generic blog or parked page. And maybe this is just me but I think the web is flooded with subpar pages and any well developed page will be more quick in generating steady traffic. That being said, almost any domain can be made valuable in my opinion.

Also, I think the majority of you are talking about the big time advertisers. Of course they will only want mega-huge traffic. I think you could secure a handful of local advertisers. They may not pay a ton of money, but if you have enough sites and 2-5 small-time advertisers it can be a nice supplemental income.

[levelonewords]

[i]
The toughest part of this model though is ad sales - even with the best site with the most traffic in a certain niche, you still have to go out and make the sales. [/B]

I think as the advertisers options in traditional media shrink sales will become easier simply because there are less avenues to reach customers.

[levelonewords]

Originally posted by trader
It's extremely difficult to market and sell ads on your websites. The problem is individual advertisers fail to appreciate the value of highly targeted traffic if on the low side. All they seem to appreciate is very high traffic, even if non-targeted. When I tell them 100 keyword targeted visits is usually better quality for them than say 1,000 untargeted thay act bewildered by it and often say they prefer the 1,000 vs the 100.

If you can target a Geo area that isn't being served by any or any good websites for whatever reason - and there are many - businesses will flock to your site.

[brisbanedomainer]

Originally posted by levelonewords
If you can target a Geo area that isn't being served by any or any good websites for whatever reason - and there are many - businesses will flock to your site.

The perfect example of this would be I thought Toowoomba.com was doing as poor job so I brought ToowoombaAustralia.com. I haven't developed it yet but the goal is to do a better job than Toowoomba.com.

[snoopy]

Originally posted by levelonewords
Its even more unrealistic for a newb to get / afford enough PPC type names to live off parking or Google imo.

Agree, though I don't think the thread starter was talking about domain parking or type in names.

[snoopy]

Originally posted by gold2platinum
Also, from what I have read in some places, if you get too many clicks on your ads you get booted out of Adsense anyway.

It is a bit like saying if you drive a car someone might run into you, not a good reason for not using PPC in my view. 3rd party ad networks (PPC and banners) is how the vast majority of advertising based sites make money, even the very biggest sites, very few sell their own ads.

[levelonewords]

Originally posted by snoopy
It is a bit like saying if you drive a car someone might run into you, not a good reason for not using PPC in my view. 3rd party ad networks (PPC and banners) is how the vast majority of advertising based sites make money, even the very biggest sites, very few sell their own ads.

I'm not convinced that that is true within the Geo Site arena. While many use Google the bigger owners make a lot more through direct advertisers imo.

Look at Skip Hoagland's sites at Intellistrand.com

MyrtleBeach.com, HiltonHead.com etc.

and CCIN's holdings

PalmSprings.com, LagunaBeach.com etc.

I can't imagine their Google Ads even approach the revenue from the directs.