Clever and lucrative websites

[Blueskied]

This thread is about websites that make decent money - like this site.
For our inspiration and daydreams.
I am - and i guess many of you too - specially interested in sites

• made by individuals (not big staff sites by big corporations)
• which suceeded through cleverness (original content, marketing,...)

I'll start with these 3 sites.

1. The Million Dollar Page - The Million Dollar Homepage - Own a piece of internet history!
A guy sold 1 Million pixels for 1$ each. Brilliant, useless, pure viral-marketing.

2. Plentyoffish - Plentyoffish.com Free Online Dating Service & Dating Site
Free online dating site by a guy who makes a lot of money with it. Nice name.

3. Cool Tools - Kevin Kelly -- Cool Tools
Blog by Wired editor Kevin Kelly. Started as small site about a personal interest (cool gadgets) and has grown over the years.

What successful sites do you know?

[jamestl2]

Are you determining success based soley on how much income the website is generating? There's many out there that aren't making much money, but have tons of traffic on a daily basis.

One of those that I like to read once in a while was created by satire writer named Maddox - The Best Page In The Universe.

Money wasn't a motivating factor, but I heard he still makes a decent amount of cash from selling merchandise and his book sales.

[mustard76]

Originally Posted by jamestl2

Are you determining success based solely on how much income the website is generating?

I'm interested in examples of websites that generate close to a full-time income for their owners ($4k+ per month depending on where you live and how you spend) and were built by one or two people with no VC financing.

[Blueskied]

If a site has tons of traffic it can make money,too. That Maddox site reminded me of another venture:

4. Penny Arcade - Penny Arcade! - The Fangspire, Part One
Two nerds blogging and drawing comics, mostly about videogame culture.

Maybe some of you know sites that are a little less well-known than my examples. I've heard of a Jehovah's Witnesses dating site run by a guy making like 10.000$/month for example.

[wakeshine]

These kinds of sites are fun and I've tried to launch things like this before, but in the end you're kind of hoping for a lottery winning. It's ok to buy a lottery ticket once in a great while but it's an attempt to get OUT of your current situation.

Running a great web business is a journey to get IN to a great situation, to build a new career and life that is producing value and giving you great reward.

[Tayrak]

If you're looking for quick ideas on how to make money off websites head straight over to the 'how to make money off websites' category of the 'net. People continually hand out their money to figure out how to make money. Travel sites are great too, then the ever popular enlarge your body parts theme never seems to run out of customers.

Actually you can make a website pay out regardless of its theme if you have enough determination. Some lady made it big doing a blog about the great north, basically she dissed her husband and whined a lot. It got her a book deal. No word if she got the book written though.

Hey this is the internet anything can happen at least once

Tayrak