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5 ideas that have become online money makers

21st April 2012 5 Replies Farshad

Hobbies have always been an inspiration for many successful people. While most of us attempt to pursue “safe careers” by going for occupations that may bring us monetary benefits, pretty often we lose sight of our hobbies in our busy lives.

However, with the internet boom many people can now change that. There are many success stories, from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates who ruthlessly pursued their goals and didn’t follow the bandwagon. But in this article I am going to explore a few more down to earth examples.

What is to follow is a list of five e-businesses that started as a hobby or a small idea that brought immense success to their owners. While the below examples might not contain websites as famous as YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, they are examples that we can all relate to, and maybe borrow a few ideas from!

The Million Dollar Homepage

I still remember watching a report about the guy who set up The Million Dollar Homepage on the news (can’t remember if it was BBC or CNN). The founder of The Million Dollar Homepage (Alex Tew) sold pixels of his website for $1, to raise money for his University expense. The site was such a success that it turned out to become a website that is nothing more than several pixels of small ads. I hope by now you would understand what I meant when I said, “examples that we can all relate to”.

FindAGrave.Com

When it comes to novel ideas that made people money, this website takes the cake. It provides a service that I wouldn’t have comprehended, had I not learned about this website.

Find A Grave is a website that helps people locate the graves of a famous people. It turns out that Jim Tipton liked to visit the graves of famous personalities and used this idea to create a kind of search engine that helps people locate graves of famous people.

So if you have a hobby of visiting famous places or areas that can help, say vacationers, then you might be the next big success story.

PickyDomains

PickyDomains is another idea that got me scratching my head. The founder of the site was good at coming up with interesting names, so he started a crowdsourcing service that allowed people to seek help in finding interesting domain names and slogans.

The idea was to let a community of people provide novel names and not to rely on bots, which arguably lack imagination. If you have been looking for vacant domain names in a domain search engine, then you will know what I mean.

So if your friends, family and bots have failed you, then it might be time to seek advice from a community of people, who just like coming up with cool names and slogans.

Gawker Media

While the Gawker Media website itself is successful enough, it is worth pointing out that this media groups is perhaps the world’s most famous blogging network.

The reason I have included the Gawker example is because one thing that most of us can do easily is blogging (something I’m doing right now).

Gawker Media has the world’s most successful blogs ranging from Lifehacker, Gizmodo to many others. The Gawker network was started by Nick Denton who is a journalist and an entrepreneur. While he claims that blogging isn’t that profitable, he has still made millions from his successful line of blogs.

Amazon

I know I said there will be down to earth examples in this post, but I have to add this one. I have been following Amazon since I was a child and have seen the company grow beyond belief.

What started as an online book store was soon to become one of the first e-stores in the world. But it was not just a good idea that made Jeff Bezos the world most successful e-retailer, but the fact that he took risks when it mattered.

It is said that the company did not expect any profit for five years, which also made shareholders a bit edgy. Nonetheless, the internet gold rush paid off and Amazon, which diversified, became one of the most successful companies in the world.

The above mentioned examples are just a few of many success stories that made people successful because they dared to use their ideas to materialize them into something successful (even if someone enjoyed visiting graves).

The point is that it might not be too late for any of you try out something that may allow you to turn your abilities into something successful, and to let you in on a secret, I’m already trying out something myself, guess I don’t want to regret not trying my hands at the internet gold rush either.

What we now know about Facebook

3rd February 2012 21 Replies Christopher Roberts

As you may have heard, Facebook plans to become a public limited company (plc) and float on the stockmarket. It hopes that this will raise around the sum of $5 billion USD (this is only about half what most people thought it would try to raise) in finance for the business, a colossal amount!

Thanks to the flotation it is estimated that around 30% (roughly 1,000 people) of the companies employees will become millionaires! That said, Mark Zuckerberg is reducing his annual salary to just $1 as of January next year. Why? Because he will have shares estimated at the value of around $100 billion!

Anyway, due to Facebook wanting to become a plc, it needed to release more detailed financial data than it ever had before, into the public domain. This means that we now know much more about this previously rather secretive internet giant, than ever before!

Finances

Thanks to its choice to become a plc, we now know that Facebook makes 85% of its income from advertising. Furthermore we know that last year it made almost $4 billion USD! Out of this, it turned an impressive 25% into profit, bringing it in $1 billion (supposedly exactly) in net profit.

It is now possible to value to company as a whole, and it is thought to be worth $100 billion USD. To compare that to other industry giants, Amazon is valued around the same amount, eBay is values at about half that figure, and Google is thought to be worth double that.

Ownership

Facebook will still be owned and controlled largely by Mark Zuckerberg. He currently owns 28.4% of Facebook and has a majority in terms of voting rights with over 50% of votes. Basically Zuckerberg owns Facebook still, and he seems to want to stay in the driving seat for a while yet!

Users

We now also know that Facebook have around 845 million active users around the world, of whom, around 450 million visit the site very regularly – that is a crazy amount!

The Future?

Facebook would be worth nothing without its users. Some people say that its users are not Facebook’s customers, but in fact the networks products. If people get bored or move on, the site will die.

If you were buying shares in an internet based business, Google would probably be a much safer bet than Facebook, as its future looks much more certain. Facebook may pay massive dividends to investors in the future, or it may go into decline and cost investors a collective $5 billion!

Friends Reunited was once great, now it stands in Facebook’s massive shadow, as does Myspace, Bebo, Foursquare and many other social media sites. All these sites how now been superseded by Facebook, the question is, will Google Plus or something else dwarf Facebook? Personally I believe that in 10 years, there will be something bigger, but we will just have to wait and see 🙂

Will Facebook start charging users?

8th October 2011 19 Replies Christopher Roberts

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There’s a lot of rumours going around about how the social media giant, Facebook, is going to start charging its users for keeping a profile. This is definitely not true. Facebook issued a statement recently stating that they had absolutely no plan or intention of charging their customers.

Even though the internet is in no short supply of unfounded rumours and gossip, it’s not hard to believe where average users would have gotten the idea.

These rumours spread across the internet for fear that many changes would be made to Facebook’s price structure. The rumour is largely a hoax, but many have been worried about the substantial changes occurring to Facebook that are planned in the upcoming months.

Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the most dramatic change yet to the social site and will implement the “timeline” feature. It will take all of your information and create a timeline of your life.

Zuckerberg is extremely excited about the change, but most people aren’t so thrilled. Some argue, that this is just another move by Facebook that greatly infringes on users’ online information and privacy. Either way, it’s site is free and will remain free for the foreseeable future.

Facebook simply wouldn’t survive a charge based membership services. There’s too much competition in the social media scene right now. Anything remotely resembling fees would sound the death of Facebook’s online supremacy.

Though it makes many wonder if there might come a time when social media sources will eventually switch to a pay system. Across the board, right now, we’re seeing some online features, once free to everyone, now being charged for or in the process of it.

Presently, most online social media sites depend largely on advertising as their main revenue stream. With millions of users interacting with these sites, advertisers are able to gain massive exposure.

Yet, it’s this issue that’s raised a lot of concerns and has begged the question, “Is Facebook selling your information to advertisers?” Facebook has vehemently denied these allegations, but it’s still unclear. For right now, no, Facebook will not charge for using it’s site, but no one can tell what the future of social media could bring.

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