i'm wondering about making a FONT site, something like www.dafont.com for instance, but ... do they make money ? all i see are few CJ and Adsense banners .. is it a feasable business model or it just pays peanuts ?
they make bank. mostly after they get a great reputation, they can start charging for better fonts later..
sure, but i mean in average do they make some bucks via PPC or PPM or just peanuts ? considering big thumbnails, fonts, and download take a lots of bandwidth, is it worth it or not ?
It is an interesting niche. There are a lot of players, but not anything like the ringtone chaff. If you have expertise in fonts if you can think of something that they don't have, if you have a better way to attract traffic, go for it. I notice that there is already a site that lets you upload a JPG of a font you are looking for, and it identifies it. Hard to compete with people like that. best regards wiz
But the answer to your question "do they make money?" is not easy to answer. Does your local gas station make money? "At least enough to continue to do what they are doing" is the only answer you can get unless you travel to the headquarters and count the number of Beemers in the parking lot. best regards wiz
not that hard if u have large $$$$ to invest or build a lot of back link/. I got make my way through for my arcade game so i'm sure with $$$$, u could rank well. toby
thank guys but ... do they MAKE BUCKS $$$ ? i mean... compared to a blog, a news site, whatever else... i have the expertise to deal with fonts, thanks, but point is, what's the CTR ? what's the average click value ? dafont.com for instance, great service, great fonts, and it's all free with just a CJ banner and one adsense on the footer.. certaily they pay at least the hosting fees but i wonder, do they get few bucks in their wallets as weel or is just something they do as a hobby ? is there a steady market for FONT sites ? is it worth it ?
This kind of information is usually carefully guarded, especially if they are raking in the dough. You might check what the click prices are on bid. If they are paying $15 per click through you might have a profitable industry. If everyone is bidding minimums maybe it is a hobby. best regards mark
Three days ago, I created an AdSense URL channel for my font site, Rad Fonts, to see what the CPC and CPM was. I can't tell you though, because not a single ad has been clicked on that site since I created the channel.
I'm sure those free font sites also earn revenue via affiliates (for those fonts that you have to pay for).
i love the logo of your site ! veeeery old school .. reminds me the good old DOS 3.11 CPC : too bad nobody clicked so far, let us know how it goes once you have some news ! CMS : which CMS or script have you used to make the auto-thumbnails ? in PHP i could make a custom script using imagettftext() but i'm sure there already good scripts around, gotta check.
yes, there's fonts.com for instance, they pay 15% for each font sold, but i really wonder if there's a market for this stuff. years ago paid fonts were all the rage, i even worked for a company who was in that business, people had just the usual system fonts and anything else was hard to find or very expensive. now with the internet you can easily find font packs containing 1000s of free fonts, who's gonna pay anymore apart the few real professional who certainly don't come to you unless you're an authority in your niche ? p.s. most of the "free fonts" you see on the net are NOT free in reality, they're usually hacks of copyrighted fonts.
i can't tell at the moment since i've no adwords account (never needed to pay for getting visitors so far). but it sounds there are no other alternatives, so i'll probably make an account right now and see what's going on, as long as i've an idea about what it can pay and which script i need anything else is trivial. i've some fresh ideas on how to make a killer font site, and even if it doesn't pay really well it's a zero-maintenance business, actually i prefer 10 small sites with zero maintenance than 1 big sites needing a full time baby sitter.
I finally got a couple of clicks on my font site. The first was for one cent and the second was for five cents. In another month, I'll be able to buy a soda!
Look at 'free fonts' in Google Trends. There is lots of traffic there but it been in a steady decline for past 3 years. It would be pretty hard to rank page 1 for that term. The sites at the top have 100k backlinks and are old, trusted domains.
Its a business, it can pay well if done well, it will pay peanuts if not done well/ bad luck hits you. The issue of cause is where to source fonts that you know you have a licence to distribute to avoid breach of copyright or having people who are able to create interesting enough fonts that people will ultimately be happy to part with cash for. Trends tend to be cyclical and whilst I would say it is not at its peak now that isnt to say in 6months or 6 years they will be all the rage again. The difficulty is predicting the trends and knowing when you start having to spend time and money to rake it in when the trend is in your favour/ being able to survive the down times when it becomes about market share rather than profit.
you will have tons of trouble if you are hoping to get ranked for "fonts" "download fonts" "free fonts" etc, many font sites have been around for 7+ years now. They have been building links the whole time. You will find catching up near impossible. Find a new angle to attack the font market.