Sustainable future of internet. Please participate

[truelight]

Exactely - I look for content 99% of time im on the internet. I very seldom buy anything. Don't get me wrong - Internet is GREAT for buying things, but it's just faster and smoother to buy my coke at the local supermarket.

[Kaiosama]

Agreed... you must realize that TV watchers are the same. They watch TV to see their favorite programming.

Honda does not expect an immediate sale from banners. Of course these will only work on larger sites.

[solace]

I am throwing a new idea out here for discussion, on attempting to open up ways for the survival of internet sites. Please bear with the rather lengthy post
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Concept number 1
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Sites that don't sell anything will not make money other than advertising. Search boxes, CPC, CPA, CPM, they all come under advertising, for thes sake of this discussion.
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Concept number 2:
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Internet advertising is inadvertantly linked to sites dealing with direct sales. CPC, CPA, CPM are undisputed examples. TAF, Search engine affiliates less so, but their source of income are still those sites dealing with direct sales one form or another.

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Concept number 3:
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Internet direct sales will never reach the same level, or remotely near the same level, as offline sales. Internet sales is crippled by the overdependance on credit cards. The items on sale are affordable by the average person who surfs the net. But that does not mean the average person is able to buy the item, even if willing. If we calculate the demographics of the percentage of population that has access to credit cards, we can see how drastically we are reducing the market size. Reduce that even further by only including those who come online.

The three concepts above are fundamental to my dreamt up proposal:


Key Concept to Proposal
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Publishers should stop depending on sites with direct online sales for advertising.

The market size of has been severely taxed, and the profits shared among too many levels of affiliates. This includes payment to immediate affiliates (affiliates of amazon.com)and publicity cost (get high search ranking on gothree, pay doubeclick for banners > doubleclick n gothree pays end publishers).
The pie is simply not large to go around.


Secondary Concept
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Reach out to offline companies.

When a guy sees a pepsi ad on tv, he cant click on the remote to order one. But pepsi knows its creating future demand and brand awareness. Online direct sales sites refuse to see that, or are unable to see that. Any kid can just fork out 50 cents to buy Pepsi. But not any kid can fork out a credit card and order it online. Pepsi doesn't care if its ad is played on tv, or radio, or bulletine board on the highway, or INTERNET. Yes, we are missing out something isn't it?

Internet a medium of advertising for offline products
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If radio broadcasting can not just survive, but turn profitable from advertising with the mere use of the sense of sound, it would be ridiculous for the "multi media" internet to fail.

An idea will be to develop technologies such as Flash, so that download of ads of acceptable standards will not take too long. Banner ads do not make a substantial impact. But a full page ad may.

We should not limit our imagination of full page ads to pop-ups, since they are obtrusive, takes the visitors by surprise, and can be turned off before it is seen. We can use frames to show compulsory ads. For example, to access my image gallery, the visitors will be brought to a page with 2 frames. The bottom frame will take up 80-90 percent of the screen. This frame will load first, with a flash advertisement that sells offline products. The top frame will load later, and will be the link to final destination of my image gallery. New ideas can be thought up to prevent bookmarking of the gallery page, or dynamically create links.

This idea, is of course, raw in its form. What I am trying to do here is not daydream the impossible. Looking at the direction that the net is taking, it is a matter of time we milk searchboxes and CPA/CPC dry, the same way we milk CPM dry.

Already, CPC are extremely selective of their publishers. It is a matter of time they turn CPA. And if all ads are CPA, the revenue of a general, non targetted site will be worthless.

As for searchboxes, they are run by searchengines who are funded by companies who bid for keywords. Eventually, these search engines will only, or mainly list those of direct sales sites, who are the only ones with a reason to spend money on publicity. The return on investment on the end publisher to use these bidded listing search engines will make such investment unworthy. At the end of the day, when the average internet surfer tries to search for something, and can only see results that leads to online sites, these search engines will be abandoned by the average surfer.

In case I am sounding like I am on drugs, I try to use a hypothetical scenario. Boy A comes to gothree.com. Boy A searches for anime. Listing 1 - 100 of anime are online shops. Boy A has no credit card, and never wanted to buy anime in first place. Boy A wants information on anime, not buy product. Boy A decides not to come back to gothree. Gothree decides to stop paying affiliates. Direct sales site decides to stop paying gothree

Conclusion
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For those who bothered to read up till here, I thank you. I really don't want to see internet continue its path down the drain. I am not saying my idea will work. I am trying to start people thinking on how to create a sustainable future for internet. If the internet of the future comprises of sites that just sells products, wouldn't it be really sad?

[jkcity]

If the internet only existed of places to buy prodcts the internet would not exist as many people come on to look for content and buy there products online while doing this, I can't see people logging on to just buy products, except for a few people.

[freebiesforever]

It seems like my site is doing great, I think sites will need to offer Free offers in order to provide competition with other similar sites in the future.

It's all on Freebies---:0)

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Get Free offers and donate Free

www.freebiesforever.com

[solace]

I think your site is well thought out in generating commission links, and making them look like part of your content. That's great. But that is not addressing the issue.

Most webmasters here do not worry much about generating traffic. While some of us do, most would not need to resort to give out freebies that we pay out of our own pockets to build traffic. What is pressing now is to generate revenue, not traffic.

Offering freebies will build traffic, yes. In the past, that means just as much as generating revenue, but this is no longer true today. I don't want my site to grow these days, because the growth in expenses that comes with these visitors is not proportionate to the growth in revenue at all. I lose money if I get more visitors.

[freebiesforever]

Well, How are you supposed to Make Revenue if you don't get a lot of traffic coming to your site. When I was first starting out with my site I was only getting 100 hits a day- and wasn't making any revenue. Now I'm getting between 1000-2000 hits a day and starting to make more money. Oh well, It does seem like advertising banners don't work that good compared to have links to your sponsors.

Anyway this is my opinion.


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Get Free offers and donate Free

www.freebiesforever.com

[Kaiosama]

Traffic at that rate is still "affordable." I think he is talking about what happens when you reach the 15,000+ unique per day rate. I am pretty much in the same boat you are in Freebies with about 10,000 hits a day (both of us don't have to worry about high bandwidth bills!).

My site was not created right of the bat for money making. Like many content sites it simply depends on ads for revenue.

[Lil_Red]

Originally posted by freebiesforever:
Well, How are you supposed to Make Revenue if you don't get a lot of traffic coming to your site. When I was first starting out with my site I was only getting 100 hits a day- and wasn't making any revenue. Now I'm getting between 1000-2000 hits a day and starting to make more money. Oh well, It does seem like advertising banners don't work that good compared to have links to your sponsors.

Anyway this is my opinion.

Solace has a valid point. A year ago, every dotcom was fixated on traffic - revenue was not even a factor then. Now, with the collapse of the Internet economy, websites are stepping back and saying to grow I need this much revenue.

I worked at a dotcom until a few months ago who aggressively went after traffic. Between August 1999 and August 2000, they went from 2 million pageviews a day to 7 million pageviews a day. During this period, no one figured out the cost associated with the increased traffic vs. the revenue. When I left, their burnrate was $500,000 a month ($80,000 of it was the cost of just the bandwidth) and their revenue was $50,000.

Based on this example, I would say Solace is correct to be worried about too much growth too fast.



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[freebiesforever]

Okay, That might be possible, if you get like 15,000 hits a day.. then you may not want to get more traffic then that, But I think in order to make money you need to have the right affiliate programs that are similar to your website. Anyway what do people think of my website? I re-designed it.

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Get Free offers and donate Free

www.freebiesforever.com

[Kaiosama]

Right now most of my hits do come from affiliate programs. Infact I am getting 100% of my money from affiliate programs as CJ servers my banners and Search referral takes care of the searches.

I get over 1.5 CPM right now with the both of them. It looks like the mojority of my visitors searches are not favorable to advertisers so I will lose sr's flat rate of 3 cents per click. I guess that's what happens when your visitors don't search for online merchants.

[solace]

Originally posted by freebiesforever:
Oh well, It does seem like advertising banners don't work that good compared to have links to your sponsors.

That's exactly one of my point. The affiliate model does not work for all sites. Say I have a gaming site. The most I can earn from affiliation is through sales of games or game guides. And kids surfing game sites are not looking to buy stuff, or are able to buy stuff. And seldom do we find affiliate programs that makes us money with giving away free games.

And if sites are built around making money, and not the other way round (for content, then make money), the internet will eventually be an online marketplace and little else.