Running a portal website is a very good way of making some online money. You will be providing local communities with useful information about local small businesses, local classified ads, news pages and weather forecasts. There are a lot of things you can do to monetize a portal website. One of those things is advertising. If you want to make a living with your own advertising portal, consider the information listed below.

• What Should You Know About Make A Living With Your Own Advertising Portal?
• Can you Make a Living Off AdSense?
• How do Web Portals Make Money?
• How Much Money can you Make From Ads on Your Website?
• Can you Make Money With Google Sites?
• How Much Does AdSense Pay Per 1000 Views?
• What Factors Affect AdSense Earnings?
• Is Google Ads Still Profitable?
• How Many Views do you Need to Make Money on a Website?
• What is the Most Profitable Website?
• Which Type of Website is Best for Earning?

What Should You Know About Make A Living With Your Own Advertising Portal?

Joint venture brokering

Owners of portal websites come in contact with business owners from time to time. Most of the time, these owners do not know how to market their businesses. Since you are knowledgeable about marketing and also know many business owners, you can become their middleman by positioning the complementary products or services that they may have for their different customers and clients. This is a joint venture service that you can charge a flat rate for.

Sell advertising spots

Meet with local businesses personally so that you can discuss with the owners about the benefits of advertising on your portal. You need to aggressively market your site by selling an advert spot and adding a package deal to go with it such as a website and an advert spot or by combining any other service you can think of.

Read Also: Rent Out Forum Signature On Popular Forums To Make Money

If the owners have a website, you can ask to link it to your portal which would help to increase traffic to their site. Advertising sales is a continuous and demanding process but once you get it right, you can make a living with your own advertising portal.

Website design and marketing service

Another way you can make a living with your own advertising portal is to run a website design and marketing service. Since you have successfully established your own site, you can use the same skills added to your internet marketing experience to assist other business owners who want their site to rank very high with search engines. 

You will simply be outsourcing tasks such as article writing, website design and direct response marketing and supervising these tasks. This elevates your status to a project manager and you get to keep a large percentage to yourself.

CPA network

A cost-per-action (CPA) network pays a certain amount of money whenever visitors carry out a particular kind of action. These actions could be signing up for a free offer or buying a particular product. If you join one or two of these networks, you will be able to offer people who visit your portal website product or services that are not readily available in the community but are desired by your visitors.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is another way to make a living with your advertising portal by selling products of other companies and earning a cut for yourself.  Visit the commission junction marketplace and you will see a line of products and services that you know will interest people in your locality.
Make sure that you advertise your portal in as many ways as you can. Include it as a link to the email address signatures and also do some traffic exchanges.

Can you Make a Living Off AdSense?

Google Adsense is a platform for publishers to put up ads next to their digital content – like articles on their website or videos on YouTube. Every time an ad that Google shows within an article on your website is clicked, they share a small ad revenue paid by the advertiser to you, the content owner.

Adsense is still highly profitable and you can make money with it. But it will never be a substitute as my main revenue source.

Success doesn’t happen overnight. Give the system time to adapt and show you its potential. It could take at least a couple of weeks for the numbers to start climbing – if you are doing the right thing. “Doing the right thing” means:

1. You comply with the policies
2. Your ads are highly viewable (IAB recommends at least 70% viewability)
3. You publish high-quality and engaging content which results in longer session duration
4. You don’t flood your site with too many ads
5. You make changes one at a time and monitor the impact on performance

When deploying changes, your goal is to find out which of them has negative versus positive results. If you don’t have the discipline and you launch an army of changes at once, if something goes wrong, there’s no way you can pinpoint which one caused it.

During the initial launch, give it time – at least two weeks. Once the numbers are fully adjusted, go ahead, and experiment with your ad optimization strategies. A few things to consider optimizing or experimenting with:

1. Ad placements.
2. Ad sizes
3. Ad format or colors
4. Number of ads per page
5. Auto ads (on versus off)
6. Running AdSense as backfill on Google Ad Manager to compete in real-time with other demand partners you have in your stack
7. Running AdSense hardcoded (not using an ad server)

Again, experiment with one strategy at a time – give it a couple of weeks. Run your reports and focus on the most important key performance indicators: viewability % and CTR, plus the overall impact on revenue and CPMs.

Filter out bad strategies or those that are not working. Keep optimizing until you’re satisfied with the numbers. Take note of seasonality, having the first quarter of the year as the lowest in advertising, so you certainly cannot compare performance in March versus April. Just like the first month of each quarter, the first week of any month is usually not that great either as it’s when advertising budgets are still being adjusted.

The bottom line – have a plan, set a timeline, and evaluate results.

How do Web Portals Make Money?

The most important part of any website monetization strategy is traffic. Without traffic, your website could have the best content in the world that nobody knows about. Most website owners spend more time figuring out new ways to generate traffic than any other activity related to the site.

The 24 Hour Traffic Plan teaches you some of the most important traffic generation strategies in use today. Combining some of these strategies is the best way to ensure your website reaches as many readers as possible and generates revenue for you.

If you are not familiar with website traffic, it simply refers to the number of unique visitors a website receives. Typically, this is determined on a monthly basis although many tools allow website owners to view daily statistics. This is helpful when you post new content and want to monitor how many people view your recent postings.

Once you have successfully started driving traffic to your website, you can actually begin to make money. Advertising is by far the best way to generate revenue from your website. Some advertising campaigns pay you just for the number of visitors coming to your site while others require that the visitor perform some action (such as make a purchase or click on a link) for you to get paid.

Google AdSense

As the biggest name in search engines, Google is a great place to start earning money from your website. The AdSense campaign is free to join and places advertisements on your website based on the type of content you provide.

For instance, if you own a website about traveling to Europe, Google AdSense will automatically place ads related to traveling. When users click on these links, you are paid. This is known as a pay-per-click or PPC campaign. Although the amount you get paid for each click may only be a few cents, if you have a large amount of traffic coming to your website, these clicks quickly add up to a respectable paycheck.

AdSense Optimization for Your Website makes sure your site is taking full advantage of this powerful tool.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when you advertise specific products on your website and receive a commission each time they sell. This model works well for informational products such as e-books as well as physical products from major retailers.

When you’re first starting out, there are a variety of sites that allow you to offer affiliate products without directly contacting the company selling the products. As your website grows in popularity and you become more experienced, you may decide to reach out to major retailers directly for affiliate opportunities.

The key to effective affiliate marketing is to make sure any affiliate opportunities you offer on your site are related in some way to the content you are providing your readers. Using the travel example again, affiliate offers that let people save money on airline tickets, for instance, could result in a substantial passive income stream from affiliate marketing.  The Online Affiliate Academy teaches you how to maximize affiliate income quickly.

Selling Your Own Informational Products

You may realize that you have built a strong reader base who is genuinely interested in what you have to say. If so, consider creating your own informational product. E-books are a great way to generate passive income from your website and can represent a sizable portion of your monthly revenue.

Of course, creating your own informational product requires detailed knowledge of the topic and some degree of writing skills. Alternatively, you can outsource the writing to an experienced writer for better results. For a small one-time fee, visitors are able to purchase and download your informational product and you immediately reap the benefits of this income stream.

There are hundreds of other ways to make money from your website. Millions of websites generate revenue every day using the techniques described above as well as a variety of others. Remember that the key to successfully monetizing your website is traffic.

The more website traffic you have, the more income opportunities will be presented to you. Focus on creating unique, valuable content and traffic will follow. Once you begin making money from your website, you will wonder why you didn’t think of this sooner. So get out there and join the millions of other people making a living from their websites!

How Much Money can you Make From Ads on Your Website?

Advertising won’t pay you anything significant unless you attract massive traffic. And even when you have that massive traffic, the payout is probably much lower than you can earn through other revenue models.

Typical CPM rates (the amount an advertiser will pay you per thousand page views) might be around $5 or less, depending on the size of your site, your topic, and your visitor’s demographics.

That means if you’re trying to earn just $5,000 per month, you would need over 1 million page views. Can you build your site’s traffic to that level? Sure, but it will take significant effort, and $5k/month is a pretty awful return for that effort.

Another thing to note about advertising is that it generally isn’t even an option for smaller sites. Advertisers want to reach a large audience, and they don’t deal much with sites that have less than 100k page views per month. Google Adsense and some other advertising networks will work with smaller sites, but the CPM rates tend to be lower.

Can you Make Money With Google Sites?

If you have a public site built on Google Sites, you might be interested in earning revenue with Google AdSense. AdSense allows website publishers such as yourself to show targeted ads on their sites and earn revenue from their traffic. It also helps visitors find things they may be interested in based on the content of those sites. Over 1 million publishers use AdSense to monetize the content on the sites they’ve worked so hard to build.

AdSense shows ads relevant to the content of the site and you can easily customize the look and feel of the ads to match your site. For example, if your site is about fashion, you may show ads for shoe designers or clothing stores. If a page on your site is about cars, you may see ads for car dealerships or auto shops on that page.

Using filters, you can control the content of the ads you display by choosing to block categories of ads or even specific advertisers.With the free suite of powerful AdSense reporting tools, you can pull detailed reports that will help you track your revenue and identify opportunities to earn more money.

You can see earnings by day, page, domain or specific ad unit and can also use Google Analytics to see the source of your traffic and earnings.Adding AdSense to your Google Site is easy.

Just follow these steps:

1. Click the More actions drop-down menu at the top right of your site, and select Manage site.
2. Click Monetize on the left side of the page.
3. Click the Monetize this site button.
4. Create a new AdSense account or use an existing account. Follow the instructions, depending on the radio button you select.

Once you’ve enabled AdSense, go to any of your site’s pages in the edit mode, click Insert, and select AdSense to insert ads within your page. You can also choose to have ads displayed in your global sidebar.

How Much Does AdSense Pay Per 1000 Views?

AdSense pays $8-20 for 1,000 views on average. The total earnings depend on the website category, the type of content you provide, the amount of website traffic, where users are located, and how ads are set up in Google Adsense to pay the most per thousand views.

Google AdSense uses Revenue Per 1,000 impressions (RPM) to represent the estimated earnings you would accrue for every one thousand impressions your website receives and is calculated as follows:

RPM = (Estimated Earnings / Number of Pageviews) * 1,000

Here’s an example calculation:

• $100 earned from AdSense
• 10,000 pageviews
• RPM = ($1,000 / 100,000) which is $10 RPM

Google ads pay $0.08 to $0.20 per view on average. AdSense publishers receive 68% of the ad revenue recognized by Google in connection with this AdSense content and 51% for AdSense Search regardless of the publisher’s geographic location.

Here are some examples of how much AdSense pays for 1,000 views on a website in various categories:

• Arts & Entertainment: $5.62 per 1,000 pageviews
• Autos & Vehicles: $9.20 per 1,000 pageviews
• Beauty and Fitness: $13.01 per 1,000 pageviews
• Finance: $32.13 per 1,000 pageviews
• Food & Drink: $14.33 per 1,000 pageviews
• Health: $17.40 per 1,000 pageviews
• Home & Garden: $23.35 per 1,000 pageviews
• Real Estate: $14.50 per 1,000 pageviews
• Sports: $4.23 per 1,000 pageviews
• Travel: $14.10 per 1,000 pageviews

Note: These earnings are based on sites targeting North America. You can get a quick estimate of how much AdSense pays for your website or blog by using the Google AdSense revenue calculator. With this tool, you can select the region your website or blog targets and its relevant category to find out how much you can expect to earn each year based on the average monthly pageviews.

What Factors Affect AdSense Earnings?

Website Category

The website category impacts how much you’ll get paid per 1,000 views with Google AdSense. Categories like finance and health, for example, have higher advertising bids for cost-per-thousand (CPM) views and cost-per-click (CPC), which also translates to higher earnings per visitor. Compare that to low CPC and CPM categories like sports and arts and entertainment that don’t pay much for each view or click.

Type of Content

The type of content you publish also affects how much AdSense pays per click and pageview. For example, ads that are displayed on web pages that have high commercial intent (i.e., the visitor wants to buy a product or service) will pay you more money than a page that’s focused on informational content (i.e., the user wants to get an answer to a question).

You can make more money for every thousand views with AdSense by simply changing the types of keywords you target with your content. Publishing articles that are based on topics with high cost-per-click (CPC) values is an easy way to increase your AdSense earnings.

Amount of Website Traffic

The more website traffic you can get, the higher your AdSense earnings will be. Therefore, you should aim to attract more visitors through organic search engine optimization (SEO) strategies and try to keep those users on your website by navigating to more web pages per session.

The goal for every website should be to increase the total number of pages viewed per visitor with each session. For example, a website or blog that has an average number of 3 pages visited per session for each user will typically make more money with AdSense than a website that only serves 1 page per visitor.

User Location

The source of your website traffic directly affects how much you can make per thousand visitors with AdSense. Locations in the United States and Asia pay the highest amount per pageview and click for each visit while countries in the Middle East and South America pay the lowest CPM and CPC.

Google Ads Setup

The way you have your Google AdSense settings set up can cause you to earn more or less money per click and per view. Those ad settings include:

• Auto Ads: With this feature turned on, Google will automatically show ads across your website or blog in the best places to increase AdSense revenue. With it off, you’ll need to add the AdSense code manually throughout each web page.
• In-Page Ads: Thes ads appear within the main body of the content on your web pages which allows more ads to appear to increase earnings.
• Multiplex Ads: These are grid-based ad units that show content recommendations. Also called “Native ads”.
• Anchor Ads: These are ads that stick to the bottom of the website and continue to appear as the user scrolls through the page.
• Vignette Ads: These are full-screen ads that appear between page loads.
• Ad Load Percentage: This feature lets you control how many ads are loaded on the page (e.g., minimum or maximum).
• Excluded Pages: This feature lets you exclude specific pages so ads do not show on them. That means you will not earn any money from AdSense for those pageviews.

Is Google Ads Still Profitable?

Absolutely. Google Ads are worth it because they provide a cost-effective way for businesses of all sizes to reach a virtually unlimited, targeted audience. They’re extremely flexible and you can start, stop, pause, or even adjust your bids at any time.

Google Ads, formerly called Google AdWords, is one of the most popular pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platforms in the world.

Basically, you choose targeted keywords and bid on them, based on the amount of money you’re willing to spend per click. You choose keywords that are specific words or phrases that are often used in search queries related to your product or service.

When a user performs a search that contains your keywords, your ads will appear above organic search results on search engine results pages. This greatly increases your potential for attracting new customers based on the search terms and keywords they enter into Google search.

With 1.2 trillion queries per year, 3.5 billion users daily, and 40,000 searches per second, it’s safe to say Google Ads offers a virtually unlimited number of opportunities for marketers looking to increase brand awareness and sales.

Let’s dive in deeper to see why Google ads are worth your time and money.

1. PPC Advertising Delivers Results Faster Than SEO

The biggest difference between SEO and PPC is the amount of time it takes to see results.

With Google Ads, you’ll see results nearly instantly. Seriously. Within minutes of your ad is approved, you could start to receive new traffic.

To get started, simply enter your carefully researched targeted keyword list, set your max bid and budget, and the traffic could start to flow that same day.

With SEO, it often takes longer to see results… sometimes several months. 

While SEO is crucial for long-term sustainability, PPC is all about instant gratification.

2. Unlimited Potential

Google Ads is a scalable marketing strategy with millions of keywords to bid on and new ones added daily. That means your target audience is virtually unlimited.

Ready to boost your traffic? Add some new keywords! Created a PPC campaign that’s making you money? Increase your daily spending to bring in even more clicks.

With Google Ads, the keywords are ranked on a bidding system. When you bid higher, you can increase your position. So, if you’re in position four, increase your spending and you might jump to position two.

Money makes the world go around and the higher you rank the more traffic and clicks you’ll get. Increasing your bid allows you to attract as many potential customers as your budget allows.

3. Impressive Performance Tracking and Analytics

Google Ads software is a free tool brimming with valuable and insightful analytics built right in. It allows you to easily A/B test your ad copy and landing pages to maximize ROI- and that’s the key to any successful digital marketing campaign.

The pay-per-click stats not only tell you how your ads are performing, but also recommend what changes could be made to improve your results. They tell you everything from your average cost per click and ad position to your conversion rate… and much more.

You can see your click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-conversion (CPC), keyword search volume, ad quality score, and ad position ranking at a glance. It’s easy to see what’s working, and what’s not, and adjust accordingly.

By linking your Google Ads to your Google Analytics account, you can compare PPC and organic search data side by side. All of this data can help you spend your marketing budget smarter and provide the data to back up your decisions with upper management.

4. Flexibility and Control

A Google Ads campaign can be stopped in seconds or paused and reenabled later on without penalty. This flexibility allows you to control your marketing spend better, and with no contract or fixed terms, there’s no money wasted.

5. Get a Leg Up on Your Competitors

No matter what industry you’re in, your competition is always going to be out to steal your traffic and sales using SEO and PPC. But, with Google Ads, you can outdo them by upping your bid on the right keywords.

Say your competitors are outranking you in SERPS by investing in SEO. You can raise your bid and beat them out with a smart PPC strategy.

Or, if they’re running a PPC campaign, all you have to do is outbid them to push them down in rankings.

Not only can you use paid search to cost your competition clicks and traffic, but you can also bring that traffic to your website instead. In essence, you’re stealing their traffic and redirecting to your own website.

6. Level the Playing Field

Many people assume that whoever has the largest budget wins, but that’s not always the case. Google actually prioritizes quality and relevancy when deciding which ads to display, just like they do with organic search results.

In Google’s eyes, the more relevant the ad is to the user query, the better the user experience will be. And, a user who has a good experience is more likely to keep using Google as their search engine. 

Therefore, Google considers ad quality and relevancy to be just as important as your maximum bid per click.  So, high-quality, optimized ads don’t have to bid as high as advertisers who create poorly done, irrelevant, low-quality ads.

Sure, certain relevant keywords will be more expensive than others (with the finance industry being notoriously expensive) but higher quality ads can lead to better ad positions and significantly lower prices- even for small business owners with a tiny marketing budget.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

Relevance + User Experience = Quality Score
Maximum Bid Per Click + Quality Score = Ad Rank

So, ads with the best combination of Quality Score and CPC get the best ad position.

7. Google Ads Are Available in a Wide Range of Formats

Google Adwords was originally launched back in 2000 with rudimentary, text-based ads. Although many of the original elements remain today, Google Ads now offers tons of features designed to help users compel and entice new customers.

With things like sitelinks, social proofing, location targeting, ad extensions, and shopping ads for eCommerce, the platform now offers incredible customization and control over the ad experience.

Special ad formats are available to meet the special needs of various industries, such as hotels, restaurants, and vehicle manufacturers. You can also add rich virtual elements, including interactive maps and high-resolution images.

No matter what industry you’re in there’s a good chance you’ll discover features designed to make your services and products more appealing to your target audience. And, it’s Google, so you know new features and formats are being rolled out constantly.

8. Target Potential Customers When They’re Engaged

We all know how it works. You’re in the market for a certain product or service, so you type it into Google, and it cranks out page after page of SERPs with the most relevant ads and websites for your request being on the first page. So, you click on the first result that grabs your attention and start shopping.

The biggest advantage of Google Ads is that they appear at the top of the search results page, before organic search. That means you’re reaching your target audience at a time when they’re engaged and ready to act.

Google Ads gives you complete control over your targeting options, too, from specific search terms to age, location, and even hobbies and interests.

When you choose the right keywords, bid the right amount, and create a relevant, high-quality ad you can be right in front of potential customers at the exact moment they’re in the market for your service or product.

9. Precise Targeting of Local and Niche Markets

If you have a local business with an online presence, Google Ads offers you a fantastic opportunity to reach potential customers in your local community. In fact, 72% of shoppers who perform local searches choose to visit a store within five miles of their current location. That’s no small number!

With Google Ads, you can enable location and call extensions, display your address, and include a clickable phone number. You can even enable geographical range limits to focus on your local market and avoid competing with large, national brands.

If you’re in a niche market, Google Ads also offers the advantage of being keyword specific. This allows you to pinpoint your target audience so your ad gets shown to the right people, resulting in lower ad spend and increased lead generation.

Here’s an example of how a business can use local and niche targeting to their advantage:

Let’s say your business is in Buffalo, NY, and offers snow removal services. If you bid on a broad match term, like “home services,” you would blow your ad spend quickly with very little to show for it. That’s because you would be competing with everyone who offers home services, and not just in your local area, but also across all geographies.

So, you can see how bidding on a term like “snow removal services in Buffalo” makes a lot more sense. Not only would you end up spending less money to run your ad, but you would also likely see a much higher conversion rate because your PPC ads are targeting a niche market that is specifically looking for the service you offer.

10. Easy to Control Spending

When you create a pay-per-click advertising campaign, you set key parameters that make it easy to define your spending. You decide what you’re willing to spend per click, and you’re only charged when someone clicks on your ad.

To control your spending, simply designate a daily budget. Google will use that budget to calculate your spending over a month’s time. You’ll notice fluctuations in spending each day, but at the end of the month, your overall spending will be within the budget you’ve set.

How Many Views do you Need to Make Money on a Website?

First of all, a website doesn’t need a lot of traffic to make money. The amount of money earned will depend on how the site is monetized and the click-through rate (CTR). As a rule of thumb, a website needs at least 50 page views per day to be profitable.

You can get hosting for a new website for as little as $2-3 per month, so profit isn’t too hard of a metric to hit for a new site.

The amount of traffic you need will depend on your goals. Do you want some extra cash, a decent side income, or a full-time online business? You need a clear intention of what you would like to achieve with your blog or website.

A common goal of many part-time bloggers is to earn $100 a day. For many, it’s the level at which you can quit your job to become a full-time blogger.

If you already have a website you’ve monetized with something like AdSense, you can calculate how much traffic you need. You already know your earnings per click (EPC) and click-through rate (CTR) – from there, all you’ll need to start is to decide what your desired income is.

We use the same calculation method that was used earlier in this article.

Step 1: Desired income / Earnings per click (EPC)

$100 per day / $1 EPC = 100 clicks

To earn $100 a day at an average of $1 a click, you’ll need 100 clicks.

Step 2: No. of clicks / Click-through rate (CTR)

100 clicks / 0.02 CTR = 5,000 page views per day.

If your click-through rate is 2%, you’ll need 5,000 page views to get 100 clicks.

If you’re only looking for some extra cash or a decent side income, you obviously don’t need 5,000 page views. For example, to earn $10 a day you only need 500 page views. To earn $20 a day you need 1,000 page views, etc.

If you use other monetization methods, such as affiliate marketing, you’ll know how much you’re currently making from it as well. You’ll also know how much traffic your site is getting every month. Knowing this, you can calculate by how much your traffic should increase for you to reach your goal.

What is the Most Profitable Website?

Amazon – $34,204,000,000 $1,084 per second

Founded in 1994 and currently employing 33,700 people, Amazon.com remains the world’s largest online retailer, with the highest revenue of any company on this list. Selling an assortment of products across the world in countries as far as the UK, Austria, Japan, and China, Amazon is no longer just an online retailer, they’re the head of a very large family of companies such as IMDb, Lovefilm, Zappos, and Alexa.

There’s no doubt that Amazon has made a huge difference with where we shop in the last 15 years, with the closest website runner-up in sales being Staples with less than a third of the sales of Amazon.

Google – $29,321,000,000 – $929 per second

Google’s ability to come in and create instantly popular features such as Google+, makes it a force to be reckoned with for any website. The current leader in internet traffic is Facebook, so Google recently came out with their answer to that; ‘Google+’.

Starting out in 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google grew into most users ‘go-to’ site for searching the internet, and their user-friendly mottos of ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful and perhaps more importantly ‘Don’t be evil’, has helped them to become the globally recognized brand that they are today.

eBay – $9,156,000,000 $290 per second

Founded back in 1995 (beginning to see a pattern emerging here) by Pierre Omidyar, this is without a doubt the best and most successful alternative to traditional online shopping, where you can effectively cut out the retailer to buy and sell between user and user, cutting costs and raising money for unwanted goods.

Founded in 1995, eBay has acquired 35 companies in the past 13 years including 6 online auction sites in the US, South Korea, India, France, and Sweden, ensuring that they’re the No.1 name in online auctions. They’ve even used some of the money that they’ve raised in the past to buy companies like Skype, before selling them for profit.

Yahoo! – $6,324,000,000 $200 per second

We often think of Yahoo! as the company that could never quite keep up with Google, even though it’s 2 years older, yet Yahoo! is so much more. At no.4 on this list, it has a mammoth revenue, and the site covers many similar areas to Google, only just not as well.

Yahoo! was founded back in March of 1995 and they certainly have their fingers in a lot of pies, acquiring over 60 different companies in the last 16 years. As far as search engine traffic goes, I get 64 times the amount of traffic from Google, so it is in fact these acquisitions and ventures that make them a hell of a lot of money, not their search engine.

Alibaba – $5,557,600,000 $176 per second

Alibaba is the ultimate business-to-business tool and brings together importers and exporters from more than 240 countries and regions, all in one place. Alibaba focuses on facilitating trade between users across the world, and AliExpress focuses on smaller transactions between buyers and sellers worldwide.

With 65 million registered users in more than 240 countries and offices in more than 70 locations worldwide, they’re the market leader in the online world goods trade.

Expedia, Inc. – $3,348,000,000 $106 per second

Founded in 1996 as a division of Microsoft, Expedia, Inc. owns a range of travel brands from Hotels.com to Tripadvisor, and its massive affiliate network has boosted its revenue to an all-time high in recent years.

Back in 2008, Fortune labeled Expedia one of the top 3 most admired internet companies and one of the best-managed companies in the same year. In the 15 years that they’ve been around, they’ve become the 1-stop shop for booking a holiday, covering every aspect of travel, and making them no.1 in the online travel industry.

Priceline – $3,072,240,000 $97 per second

Priceline specializes in facilitating the sale of flights, hotels, cars, vacation, and cruises and are famous for its‘ name your own price system. In this system, travelers would name the price they wanted to pay, the service level they wanted, and the general location, but, the companies used, the exact location of hotels and flight itineraries were only revealed once the purchase had gone through and the customer had no right to cancel.

It’s an unusual idea, but it seems to have done very well for them and their celebrity endorsers. William Shatner, who was hired as a spokesperson for the company, chose stock to overpay and is rumored to have sold a large majority of it right before the dot-com bubble burst and has made approximately $600 million from it.

AOL – $2,417,000,000 $77 per second

Founded all the way back in 1991 as America Online, and rebranded as AOL in 2006, AOL is best known for it’s online software suite, where, at its prime, 30 million members worldwide would access the internet through this community. Business may be good compared to some of the other companies on the list, but when you compare what they made in 2010, to what they made in 2006 (when the company went through its rebranding), they now make less than a third of what they did.

The trouble was bloated and outdated software, overpriced services, and the fact that they were no longer keeping up with the pace of the fast-moving online world, or providing high-demand services anymore. Sure it’s making a lot of money, but we expect to see it lower on this list next year.

NetFlix – $2,160,000,000 $68 per second

This is a relatively young company compared to some of the others on this list, founded back in 1997, NetFlix is a subscription-based, online streaming and postal DVD rental company that is expanding across the world. They’ve built their reputation on their business model on a flat fee subscription, without late fees or due dates, and the ability to rent more than one film at a time.

Read Also: Make Money Online – Uploading Files And Photos

They’ve excelled where Blockbuster has failed and that’s evident in their respective companies’ revenues over the last 5 years. NetFlix recognized what was wrong with the movie rental industry, and saw where the future was going, and then went there with it. They’re coming to the UK very soon…

Facebook – $2,000,000,000 $63 per second

So popular, they even made a movie about it. As the youngest company on this list so far, founded in only 2004, Facebook currently has more than 750 million active users on it and has blown other social networks such as Myspace and Bebo out of the water when it comes to popularity.

Started by the world’s youngest billionaire – Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook is not without its problems, including considerable legal battles and rival companies. With a pattern of social networks losing their overinflated worth and a huge following, and the recent launch of Google+, who knows what’s in store for Facebook in the coming months.

Which Type of Website is Best for Earning?

Profitable websites come in different forms. For example, here are five website types with excellent potential for launching a business:

• eCommerce websites ‒ avoid the hassle of having a physical store. Have the option to sell your own products or become a dropshipper.
• Blog websites ‒ ideal for people with a particular passion and who love producing consistent content.
• Business websites ‒ use it to promote your online business by improving SEO and expanding customers’ knowledge of your brand.
• Forum websites ‒ provide the space for people to interact with one another over a specific topic. For example, job boards and product discussions are two of the most profitable forum types.
• Portfolio websites ‒ help professionals to attract potential clients and employers by displaying their work online.

Developing successful website ideas takes time and effort. However, it has the potential to become a profitable side business in the long run.

Here are five of the many website ideas we have presented that can generate a steady source of income:

• Launch an online shop
• Start a blog
• Create a membership website
• Develop a dropshipping website
• Launch a portfolio site

While there are many website ideas to explore, consider your interests when choosing one. Don’t be afraid to try different things and learn from those who have turned their website into a successful businesses.