i am sure for you PROs this is nothing new. But after many attempts and sites of all kind, simple affiliate sites, complex sites, blogs etc...i will soon try something else. In the back of my head i "know" for sure that sometimes REALLY, REALLY stupid things...or VERY SIMPLE stupid things can bring a lot of traffic. (Adsense !) You all remember that stupid "hampster-dance" from a few years ago....i saw people raving and screaming about it..while i was in awe over how pathetic and retarded it was (IMHO) Or....think about how many sites ofen just contain a joke, or something unique, dumb and funny like a single video....or things like the good old "church sign generator" Or what about (ok, this is old now)...just some extremely disgusting pictures. (Assuming here i am not talking about gore/nudity etc...this would also be against AdSense TOS) What about some extremely fat woman ? Or make up some fake story which everyone just HAS to see, including pictures etc.. or maybe even a real story...something outrageous, incredible, hard to believe. Or some video with britney or paris or...let your fantasy flow ----> THAT is the "high quality" stuff i always see having the most diggs and traffic and what is most talked about anywhere....NOT the hyper-complex websites where you sit 5 months alone to DESIGN them...to get 10 uniques a day ! I think it's time i sit down and do a bunch of really, really "stupid" sites in that sense....put some AdSense on it and see traffic coming in because the kids think it's cool to see someone popping a giant football-sized pimple, or an animated cat dancing...or 100 hampsters in an animation singing..or some pictures of my new cat which i will certainly claim weighs about 300lbs because i got her from chernobyl. She genetically mutated because of the remaining radition in chernobyl and doctors discovered that some genes are missing which are responsible for her growth not to stop. She is STILL growing. At this point she is 9' long, 289lbs....i will show her to you soon on my new website. I will aso have a video on that site showing how she swallows one of the two cows which we daily feed to her. Wait...i need to do some photshopping.... Get my drift ? Georg Edit: "The extremely fat woman" is ok. But to top this of: What you dont know is that this is actually Paris Hilton before she had her surgery ! Noone knows that of course. But i will have the proof....soon...."
For me it's a nice way dude, this is your way, there is other ways, no one can say your idea is stupid, it is smart and everything else is smart if it's done the right why, the real dump thing is building a website and fill it with stolen content or useless random information fetched from RSS feeds .
I think you are right.. stupid or simple can be very popular - UGLY can work too. My site is both simple and (some say) ugly, and it's way more popular than a lot of those fancy web2.0-took-me-5-months-to-design sites! I like to say "Ugly is the new black"..