It has been notoriously difficult to make a living from selling content on the internet. But SEOmoz.com seem to have found the magic formular and are on course to generate a whopping $1,289,760 in the first full twelve months alone. Read more here: http://dfinitive.com/blog/seo/seomoz-well-on-their-way-to-1-million-from-selling-content/
Wow nice figures !! I have signed up to their premo content and must say it was worth the money so hats off to them ......
Yes, they are called magazines, trade journals, etc. Unless I missed something, I don't see anything new here. Magazines, trade journals, etc have put online versions of their stuff for a fee years ago and do very well. People will gladly pay for good information, it's been done for eons. This is "news" to the "everything should be free and monetized by AdSense" crowd I suppose. Many solid outlets will mix the content. The site will offer up some free stuff, but the killer stuff is for paid subs only. I'm sure I missed something in all this, so feel free to point it out. It's the fools that give away premium content for free in hopes to get a few pennies as people leave the site. But, you've got to have content worth paying for, so I guess that leaves many people back in the AdSense line.
I figured I'd hop in just to clarify as I did on the blog entry about this topic: We’re not quite on track with the numbers you suggested, but we’ll get there soon (I hope) The only problem is that our costs have been rising along with it, so I suspect profit margins will be razor-thin for the first year or two. Salaries are our biggest expense, but server hardware isn’t insignificant either. That, combined with travel expenses (to help promote all this stuff) will probably make it so at the end of the year, we’ll be looking at around 850K in revenue and 100K in profit, which, while not insignificant, certainly isn’t incredible. I do suspect, however, that 2-3 years from now, our profits will be much better. We're certainly planning to continue releasing lots of cool free content (in fact a new free tool is to be launched tomorrow or Thursday), and working to make premium content more and more valuable.
Thanks for the clarification, Rand. At first glance, $1M is alot of money, but as Rand pointed out, once you deduct for labor and the amount of time to actually writing out these pieces of content, then it really isn't as much as one expected. But at the least, you are hopefully achieving some level of scale going forward.
If only I could afford the viral campaign for my dating site...... Oh, the wonderful world of the internet, where all the good stuff is uber expensive!
Only because seomoz.com content is actually worth buying, heck I bought the link building article. I'd have to say the article is great!
how much for that article ? nevermind found it , anyone used seomoz services yet ? http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seo-sem-services#viral
Umm... Well, we've got all our public clients listed here - http://www.seomoz.org/pages/clients - and there's a number of others who have asked to remain confidential. Right now, though, we're concentrating more on growing premium content, so we're not accepting new clients, but still working with folks like NPR, Yelp, AllBusiness, Answers, etc.
its everybody's dream to make such kind of money on consistent basis.....i hope i will soon be making this amount