What's your opinion on humor related sites? Can you still make money with them? I guess competition is way too big...on the other hand, kids go crazy for that kind of stuff.... Would it be profitable to start a new site ? I mean, if it's unique and done in the right way...could I still gain a profit?
Depends what you mean by humour site, really. I run a site which is (I hope) a humour site, full of reviews, rants and things written by me. I'm starting to see a rise in traffic on a month by month basis, but it's taken me a year to get here. It's basically been a hobby for me, and I didn't implement AdSense until fairly recently and haven't spent any length of time optimizing it yet. I expect to make about $100 this month via AdSense, which is more than I made last month, and hopefully less than I'll make the month after. I've also sold some text ads and have just this minute sold a 125x125 banner on three pages for what seems to me to be a decent amount of money I reckon everyone likes to laugh, so as long as you have good, steady, original content you'll get your traffic, and in turn can make a profit. Unfortunately my busiest page has the lowest paying ads on it - about 2-3c a click, so you might want to make your pages all about the hilarious world of web hosting or something similar
I agree to Baz@rr. It takes a lot of time and effort, I have www.somejokes.com and another new baby www.projokes.com least amount of promotion, but can do better with promotion.
I think it really depends on how and who you market the site to. I live in a college town and have found just by putting up fliers on campus, I get around 100-200 uniques alone just from the fliers. So what I'd do is see what type of 'market' your humor site could be categorized in then think of anyway to promote it offline ... then you will make the $$$.
That's a good point. I've never really tried any offline marketing for my humour site, mainly because I live in a village in the Highlands of Scotland, where there's a good chance the type of stuff I write about would have been burnt alive in an enormous wicker man type effigy as former friends and neighbours danced and chanted with delight and glee. That and because I've never really thought about how to market offline. Mostly the first one though.
I know that CollegeHumor.com, which is largly user driven (they submit stuff) seems to make a killing. They have many #1 spots for "humor". They sent me their advertising newsletter for the month of July and it listed their "special" July prices: Obviously that site is pretty successful. I think you just need to be in the right place at the right time good luck
Yes, make it a niche joke site. i see that there's still room for that. See http://www.nichebot.com/o/?term=joke But be prepared to work hard or else your site will be just another bad joke ( pun intended)
I got a link from their site before for nowt because they presumably liked the page I submitted to them. Brought me about 40,000 uniques over the space of a week.
Check out www.abum.com too, I got their advertising prices a couple of months ago and I figured out they are doing about making about $5k per month on advertising.