...besides scrolling ads? I have an idea but I think the site has to be free to use. The driver would be peer input.
Thoughts?

Hire a dude with a SWEET goatee and start charging a few users for his inside info?

Depends on what the site is about on how to make some money with it. Google ads are not worth it, especially dealing with their TOS for the pay. Amazon is always a good way, but that depebds on your sites content.

So ads are the only way? How did Facebook and others like that make their money in the early going? Did they just pay the hosting costs and operating expenses and went cash flow negative til someone came along?

Investor money until ad generated revenue. Repeat. Go public. Repeat over and over. Profit

This has puzzled me as well. Warren Buffett's rule is not to invest in anything where you can't understand how the company makes money. Seems like prudent advice, but is it still relevant in an Internet-based economy?

The days of making legit money off of ads are basically gone. If you can generate enough to cover your hosting costs, you're doing pretty well. I'm sure there's an exception or three of specialized websites catering to particular groups of people that generate higher than normal ad click-through rates. Or, if you've got a website with geographically homogenous users, you could make deals directly with local business (like TexAgs does). But those exceptions are few and very far between. Generally speaking, ads are not lucrative.

The only thing of substantial value that free websites generate is user data. So basically the goal is to gain enough users to attract investors. You continue to grow your user base while attracting more investor money. Eventually you have enough users and data to launch your own ad network or you can sell the data to advertisers.

That's about it for monetizing a free website. Or at least that's the only model currently employed. An alternative is a hybrid pay/free service (again like TexAgs), but that's obviously not the same as strictly free.

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So ads are the only way? How did Facebook and others like that make their money in the early going? Did they just pay the hosting costs and operating expenses and went cash flow negative til someone came along?

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In short, yes. They lost a crap ton of money over a very long period before they started making money.

I don't think Twitter's turned a profit over even a single quarter.

FB had a lot of investors who recognized the potential of a website that over 200 million (and not a billion) people looked on a daily (hell hourly for a lot of people).

I forgot when, but eventually FB had to "pay up" and finally start putting ads in. One of the biggest problems when FB went public was they had yet to putting ads on the mobile site.

There are places like Buzzfeed which make their money off embedded ads, where half of those lists are really just showing you some product.

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I'm surethere's an exception or three of specialized websites catering to particular
groups of people that generate higher than normal ad click-through rates.

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It's not an exception, it's how you make it work.

Generic general interest sites are a waste of time to put together. If you can a foothold in a niche your audience will have quite a bit of value to advertisers.

Selling ads directly beats Adsense any day of the week but if your audience is specific enough and in a niche where people would pay to be seen by them, Adsense works just fine.

Mines general interest for the general public but I think the value would come from subscription services to restaurants. It would involve the loading of their data. A yelp type (structure and functionality) would be ideal. Before you think it's a review site, it's not, and there's nothing out there like this. Everyone at sometime will wish they had it. If the app is built right, it could be very niche and useful.
Im not sure it'll be useful (or profitable) until enough users have uploaded their data. Much like Yelp/Tripadvisor, which leads me to another question: how did Yelp/Tripadvisor get enough initial reviews or data to get people to come back?

Yelp and TripAdvisor were both started with over a million dollars in seed funding and founders that worked on them full time.

That space is insanely cutthroat. Restaurants are already bombarded with tech companies suggesting new subscription based services they should sign up for.

The odds against a self-funded venture led by somebody doing it in his spare time succeeding are
astronomical.

How do you know I don't have $1MM?

Like I said earlier, it's not a rating type thing like Yelp, I just want their interface.
There's not a site out there like it yet. I can't go into the details yet. Need to secure the idea. I may not be able to dedicate my full time to it right now, but that could be changed. I just need some grade A coders.

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Everyone at sometime will wish they had it.

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You must think you're Steve Jobs.

You can get a clone of the Yelp interface for a couple hundred bucks on any large outsourcing site.

Somebody has to pay for everything.

You'll either need somebody in the process that benefits enough from your apps existence to pay, or you'll need to be able to capture a high enough number of users that it becomes valuable due to the size of the user base.

It may be an awesome product, but if restaurants don't see enough value to pay, users of the app won't be willing to pay, and you can't float the costs, it's going to be tough.

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Everyone at sometime will wish they had it.

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You must think you're Steve Jobs.

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Not let's not be silly. But I know the premise of this app, you've at least once (I'd venture per year) asked the question this would answer.

Is it windfall type deal, absolutely not. Could it be useful and potentially pay off, yes.

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Somebody has to pay for everything.

You'll either need somebody in the process that benefits enough from your apps existence to pay, or you'll need to be able to capture a high enough number of users that it becomes valuable due to the size of the user base.

It may be an awesome product, but if restaurants don't see enough value to pay, users of the app won't be willing to pay, and you can't float the costs, it's going to be tough.

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It's really hard to explain without putting the thought process and idea out there. If I did it would make perfect sense.

The users (contributors) wouldn't pay anything and stand to gain from the sharing of data, maps, etc. The subscription service and notifications would be available to restaurants. As a business owner is damn sure want to know some of this info.

I'm not sure how far to take it but I feel like it could be something worth chasing. It would take someone dedicating all their time to it to do it right.

Speaking of, where's our Munzee guy? Id like to see what he thinks of it. Last email I got he was traveling the world.

When was the last time you tried marketing a SAAS platform to a restaurant?

Never, but this is different.

I'd wager Facebook specifically makes more money off of market data research, selling aggregated user data, and local targeted advertisement than some big Google type thing.

Facebook makes nearly 90% of its income off of advertising.

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Everyone at sometime will wish they had it.

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You must think you're Steve Jobs.

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Not let's not be silly. But I know the premise of this app, you've at least once (I'd venture per year) asked the question this would answer.

Is it windfall type deal, absolutely not. Could it be useful and potentially pay off, yes.

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Is it an app that tells you where the bathrooms are?

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Is it an app that tells you where the bathrooms are?

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Ironic considering the username.

Is there any way to gather data before you actually create the webpage or app? I don't know exactly what you want to do, but if your user base and businesses are slow to build, there could be someone else who can build a website better than yours and/or use contacts to get some prominent businesses to sign up with them. All of a sudden your app and website are nothing more than an afterthought to businesses or users. I would think about trying to build your businesses portfolio before actually publishing the website or app if at all possible. Maybe you don't charge some of the first ones you sign up. This could let you use them for your test data so as soon as you go live you seem more established and have some possible bugs already worked out. That may make it harder to have a new site penetrate your market as well.

Khk,
Very interesting you say that. I've been thinking about the possibilities and enhancements over the last few days. There is a download of at least two sets of critical data that'll need to be done prior to it being functional. Half is out there but needs to be compiled, the other would be the manual entry of data most of which is public or accessible. Once the info is loaded then all that would be needed is the interface for the free end user. This is where you would really need to spend your money: app/site development and advertising to get the masses to download/visit. The economic side would come later after its grown to critical mass much like Texags. If done right, it would work. At that point, likely one of the bigger companies would want to integrate that into their apps and take us out.

I'm in the beginning phase of trying to teach myself programming. You keep working on the idea as far as putting it all together and maybe by the time it's ready my programming skills will be where they need to be. With my business acumen, I can help polish and fine tune potential issues, as evidenced above. And all I ask in return is a small equity stake.

You better get good at it, quick.