Michie4life said:
I'm not saying it's some magical way to make money, but it would help.
If you're lucky, your site can get an 0.3% click-through rate on advertisements. Most adverts pay a lot less than 50p per thousand clicks (CPM). Therefore you'd need about 300 people to get a single click, and you'd need 300,000 unique page views in order to make 50 pence.
That tallies with what myself and my brother have experienced.
He runs a massively popular website for Scouting (http://www.scoutingresources.org.uk) that often stresses our hosts for bandwidth, disk space, CPU use, etc. It's been running for > 10 years (since I was at uni and set it up for him) and has an enormous regular following and high Google page-ranking (about 50% of the time, higher than the official UK Scouting website for most Scouting-related search terms). We have *never* advertised it, never gamed search engines and never done anything to put it on them since the year 2000 (when I submitted it to one of those "put your link here to get on Altavista's bot-queue" sites - yes, that long ago), it all pure relevance and popularity that get us that high on the Google links. He makes enough to pay hosting, take the kids on a camp or two per year.
I'd be very surprised if all of the OPT websites put together got anywhere near the bandwidth he handles, or unique visitors, or anything else. Hell, he's been approached by almost every tent-manufacturer, Millets-like store, campfire song-book publisher etc. in the country for private advertising at some point - they can't beat the money he makes by a simple set of Google ad's. But advertising is not enough to get *close* to making a dent in his finances. It makes the hosting pay for itself (and our host gives us ENORMOUS discounts for charitable purposes) and gives him a little treat every now and then but that's it.
Even then - what are you going to advertise? Rival products? Beagleboards? The Caanoo? The market is small, the product is niche, the following is quite small too (given that only a few hundreds of people actually have one of the devices - hell, the buying queue is only, what, 4000 people? These forums have 20,000 members in total - that's not a lot and also not a lot of "regular" passing traffic. It's mostly the same people viewing the same forum/news page again and again looking for updates), as is the market potential for them actually having clickable adverts show in their browsers and then clicking them. You might make enough to pay for maybe a Pandora or two before the end of the year. Or you could just make a bigger fuss of advertising Pandora pre-orders, given all these press articles, interviews, etc. and make that in a few minutes. If you got ONE extra pre-order before the end of the year that didn't cancel, it would probably out-do putting advertising on every forum page and website associated with the Pandora.
