I wonder how long until us regular people cannot make money online

this won't happen if webmasters stop devaluing their unique traffic. I am sorry but $1 for a thousand people is cheap! You think Pepsi only pays $540 to advertise at a baseball game with 54,000 fans? you would be insane to think this is real value.

i've blogged about it before. we need to make at least $5-$7 CPM's to make profit as media outlets.

 

I am not too concerned with MS since most people avoid them just for their name alone.

 

All those top websites started at the same spot everyone else is. You just need to keep with it and someday you will be able to get as big as they are.

 

untrue. most top sites started with top investment firms. They were not big until big money saw their value. Even those that have no profit structure but have a unique offering have gotten popular mostly by the power of investment firms.

 

Just what you say; 'they were not big until big money saw their value'; up to that time they were little. So they *started* in the same sport most of us are. Not untrue.

 

exactly. do you know how much a media blog or news site in the 10k-1k Alexa range gets for a CPM?

do you know how much the same site in the 350k-90k range gets?

to assume that if you just 'stick with it' you will get rich is a pipedream. Sure there are a handful of upstarts that made it without sophisticated financial development, but the vast majority fail or sell off quickly. Only about 5% of usa based websites can expect to drive themselves through the murk and into the range of traffic where they are making profit.

my suggestion is take out a small business loan and start advertising your site, do that for 2 or 3 months and begin sending a business place to venture capital investors.

check out this video for example:
http://gmy.news.yahoo.com/v/13112973

YouTube is LOSING $30 million a month .. a MONTH! and they probably charge far more than your average video hosting website.

 

I am not surprised. I had the YouTube idea to provide users to share vids years before that site was born. However the cost and the huge amount of bandwidth and storage required for each user would have been too expensive. Most of the people on YouTube are kids without jobs who want to watch everything for free. They use their FireFox browsers that block all ads, so I understand the loss.

 

Odd thing about it is, if YouTube had started out charging even pennies to post a video, like eBay does, they'd be raking in the dollars.