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Originally Posted by Peaches
Yes, I do think it's closer to 40% IF you take away those that have dayjobs. I know what *I* was making with free sites and even in the worst of times was making more than $50K and I'm not the sharpest pencil in the box  |
Try it now.
It's a function of traffic.
"Back in the day", get a yahoo or dmoz listing while they were doing AOL and you see 10,000 primo hits a day to a tiny free site, fling traffic to appropriate paysite and watch the checks roll in.
After that, started taking a lot of work to build even a good looking site that was unique up to 3000 or so a day.
Now, on purely organic traffic, you can bust ass to get a true "free site" to even 100 or so hits a day. Wanna try to make $50K off a bunch of those? Look for long hours.
Everyone floods to TGP's because there's traffic there. But the content is more and more saturated and as we're discussing in other threads, the conversion rates are absolutely insane unless you OWN the TGP and can thus filter off the cream. Your margins get awfully small after you pay the hosting bill for a month's worth of feeding The Hun's surfers a bunch of movie galleries.
Search engines? You can pay your way in, tricky tricky margins there. The SE game is not for the meek these days. Gotta bust your ass to stay a move or two ahead of them.
Even spam, malware and other dark hat type stuff isn't doing what it used to. Not sure the juice is worth the squeeze there unless you're a principle in whatever you're sending it to.
There are some pockets out there, review sites, blogs, etc. And the big TGPs and linklists will always do just fine for themselves. Bottom line though is these days you actually have to produce something compelling to get that free traffic.