I am often asked questions about how to make money online and politely dodge them as it’s a vast topic, every bit as complex as investing, that could put me at a competitive disadvantage were I to discuss our techniques in the level of detail that I often require of my writing.
Earlier today, one of our good friends wrote me asking about how to make money online because he’s started a new blog and wants to at least generate enough advertising income to make it worth the effort and expense. Without thinking much about it, I wrote out my thoughts in a Google Plus conversation, and then realized I had inadvertently responded to hundreds of you who have sent in this very question.
[mainbodyad]I took some time to remove the specific numbers (I had pointed out one article on this blog that generates $1,000 in cash per year from the advertisements alone but highlighting it would result in competition) and am going to turn it into a high level, abstract view explaining to you the underlying variables that are responsible for making money from a website, whether it is a blog, an online retailer, or a corporate site that you use to secure work (such as a freelance artist).
I’m going to treat this as a scientific breakdown. It is important to note that this conversation is focused solely on the cash generation side of the equation. There are many other factors that should be included in your analysis of a business model, including capital requirements, cash conversion cycle, supplier availability, contingent liabilities and risk exposure, technical matters such as platform selection, sales compensation models, etc. Those all matter. The purpose of this post is to explain to you the things that are causing greenbacks to get deposited into your checking account, whether you are trying to run a successful blog or selling antique replica model trains.
The 4 Variables That Matter To You If You Want to Make Money Online
There are four major variables that matter if you want to make money online from your website. If you are an investor (as many of the people on this site are), the mathematical relationship between these variables is very comparable to the DuPont Return on Equity formula. The mechanics of interaction are almost identical, with the terminology slightly altered.
The variables for making money online are:
- Direct Product Sales or Affiliate Earnings
- The Total Number of Ad or Product Impressions
- The Rate Advertisers Pay Per Ad Impression
- The Click Through Rate (CTR)
These four variables, working together, add up to the total amount of cash generated by your site in a given period. Which variables require your focus depends upon the business model to which you have hitched your wagon.
Each of these variables has sub-variables that can be managed by you, the site owner. Your job is to focus on the the blue boxes, modifying these levers to the best of your ability (or the ability of the most talented person you can afford to hire). When that happens, the green boxes naturally improve. In other words, you cannot work on the green boxes directly; those green boxes are the natural by-product of what is happening below them. (I’ve explain this concept in the past on the site; how you can’t, actually, bake a pie. Instead, you can combine butter, sugar, flour, and shortening to create a crust, fill it with apple slices, and put it in the oven. The pie is the outcome; the by-product of the process. Thus, to make the perfect pie, you have to focus on the sub-processes and the pie will take care of itself.)
There are two broad metrics I use that capture the performance of the above diagram, both for my intellectual property and my retail businesses:
- Total Revenue Generated Per 1,000 Page Views
- Total Page Views Per Week
These are my preferred tools when doing back-of-the-envelope calculations because I can use them as a rough proxy to gauge what is happening to the underlying variables that drive cash generation. Each month is compared to the exact same period in the prior year. I can very quickly spot slips, while ignoring the inevitable fluctuations that happen with seasonal shifts in weather, national news, and the economy.
On some sites, especially those that use a no-page view model such as Ajax-driven refreshes, you’d have to lose the focus on page views and instead focus on “events”, which would need to be clearly defined (e.g., clicking to view a particular SKU). That’s a technological consideration that doesn’t apply to most sites so I’m ignoring it for now, but the concept would remain the same.
Looking at How to Make Money Online from the Perspective of a Retail Site Owner
Using my diagram, if I were going to start a retailer that sold stuffed bunny rabbits, I am not going to permit any external advertising. That means, my focus is going to come down to three things:
- Total page views
- Total conversions (orders) generated per visit
- Average order value
Those are my main green boxes. That means I’m going to have to look below them to focus on the things I can control.
For example, there are only two ways it is mathematically possible to increase average order value. You have to do one of two things:
- Increase the average amount per item in an order
- Increase the total number of items in an order
That’s it. There is no other possible way to increase the value of an order. Every action I take must be justified on the grounds that it is going to improve one of those two numbers. This is why it is important to understand your strategy. It will influence your site design and how you approach your customer.
At one of my companies, one of the first things we did was introduce “revenue enhancers” – small $10 or less items that got added onto the sale as an impulse buy but that enjoyed 90%+ gross margins. In the early days, this generated thousands upon thousands of dollars in free money per year for me to fund investments and take out of the business as dividends. In that case, we were attempting to increase the total number of items added to an order. In years when we have an exclusive product that is in demand, we can increase the overall prices, or introducer higher priced goods, to drive up the average item amount.
Looking at How to Make Money Online from the Perspective of a Blogger
Imagine you wanted to run a successful blog. I’ve been doing this for a long time – my household generates a lot of annual page views, some of which come from sites you’ve never even heard about that I started back when I was younger as a hobby. For me, I don’t actually recommend it as a business. I stumbled into it and made it work because I have a knack for writing clearly, and very quickly. There are much easier ways to generate cash that require less time.
Still, if you enjoy writing, it can be a fun experience. It is nice to know that if I were to wake up with no businesses, no investments, no employable skills, no house, no car, and no wallet, the spouse and I would still be getting checks from my copyrights that are far in excess of what the median American household earns per year for work done more than a decade ago. On the other hand, I don’t think you should ever consider this stable money. Ad rates are notoriously volatile and you can see significant fluctuations in short periods of time. I would never borrow money against an earnings stream produced by digital content, nor would I want to rely on it in any meaningful way were it my only source of cash generation. To do so would be a recipe for disaster, in my opinion.
[mainbodyad]Both the Saks business model (fewer transactions or clicks, higher totals per event) on a lucrative niche market site, and the Wal-Mart business model (many more clicks, lower total per event) on a broadly popular site that doesn’t monetize well can be very lucrative (look at what Michael K has achieved at Dlisted.com), but you need to be consistent and focus on what you are attempting to achieve.
(On a side note, the genius of businesses like Google, Facebook, SeekingAlpha, PlentyofFish, ad infinitum, is that they relied on user generated content to drive ever-increasing page views. Therefore, there was very little time, money, or effort required on the part of the site owner to build out the advertising inventory as the site users were doing it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In the case of Facebook, the users were doing it for free. In the case of Google, they were being offered part of the advertising money, which means there were few upfront costs, providing a negative cash conversion cycle.)
A Few Final Thoughts
Obviously, the topic is much more complex than this but in the past, I’ve explained to you how there are only two levers you can use to make your net worth increase. What I’m really doing here is explaining to you the four factors that are driving the first lever – bringing more cash in the door. By reverse engineering it, and breaking it down to the simplest variable, you can see how it becomes fairly easy from a strategy point of view. You at least know where to start, and what can be done to improve performance. It’s a framework that puts you in control by identifying your tools.
Reader Comments (27)
Comments are presented chronologically, with replies indented beneath the comments to which they respond.




Odai
August 15, 2013
Thanks for this post. I've earned some pocket change online, but it's extremely helpful to see how a seasoned veteran approaches things.
Ahmad
August 15, 2013
Speaking of making money online,
Josh what are your thoughts on the below topic:
http://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/blog/2013/08/06/4-reasons-jeff-bezos-bought-the-washington-post/
And i personally think one of his
main goals is to incorporate his new investment "Washington post"
with his old "kindle" to increase sales of both in an attempt to try
and reinvent newspapers and also a competitive edge on the ever growing tablet
market... Would really appreciate your input on this.
archont
August 15, 2013
Generating revenue online is getting hard as more and more users are starting to use plugins like Adblock, Ghostery and other selective browsing tools. In fact, those plugins are the first I get on a fresh browser install.
This can work both ways - it would be easy to engineer the site so that the plugins block not only ads but the content itself - something I occasionally see, get angry at someone trying to outsmart me and write a tampermonkey script or adjust adblock settings.
The most fruitful way to force ad-blocking users to disable their blocking is to obscure only a part of the content via anti-adblock-methods, kind of like certain news sites frontload a part of the content and paywall the rest. Fortunately for me I've yet to see this middle-ground approach implemented, as with that, I might actually start letting those sites display ads.
Joshua Kennon
August 15, 2013
Replying to archont
The market will evolve to adjust for it. The existing bandwidth structure cannot support that level of theft (which, leaving morals aside and discussing this purely from an economic perspective, is what is happening when you go onto a private site, consume media and content for free, increase the owner's bandwidth cost, and then modify the code to hide the ads that they installed as a quid pro quo ). Either much of the Internet will get put behind paywalls and subscription models, ending the vast amount of free data as we've known it, or there will be an ever-continuing arms race that will escalate to the state or national legislature.
From an online writing perspective, a very real problem for the mass publisher is that the inventory of content grows every day, much faster than global users. That means the same advertising dollars spread across more impressions, lowering profit margins considerably. The best way to overcome that if you were a site of note would be to do direct sales so that you maintained some level of exclusivity over your audience access. The Wall Street Journal, for example, will never be affected by this problem because people want to advertise directly with them, not just general impressions on some random site.
archont
August 16, 2013
Replying to Joshua Kennon
Equating adblocking with theft is a display of petty self-entitlement. It's the equivalent of refusing to tip in circumstances where tipping is customary. It's impolite and selfish, but it's not theft. Don't go there.
Joshua Kennon
August 16, 2013
Replying to archont
Entitlement is shown by someone who thinks they can take something for nothing. If a business puts out Coca-Cola and said, "You can take one as long as you throw $1 in the jar", and you don't throw $1 in the jar, you're a thief.
Reading content that is subsidized by advertising involved both time and considerable expense to the original creator. If you take it without the quid pro quo, you are a thief. Again, I'm not interested in nor talking about the morality of such an action here, I'm talking strictly economics. You've extracted value from another party and added nothing. Someone, somewhere had to write a large check for the bandwidth cost from such freeloaders.
The good news is, I don't think paywalls are inevitable for a majority of sites because most people are somewhat honest. There was an interesting social experiment done by Honesty Tea that examined whether people, when they thought no one was looking, would still contribute when they took something. A vast majority of folks do.
If you think incentives don't matter, here's a quandary to ponder: My bandwidth costs across a handful of sites now reach into the five figures per year. If, suddenly, everyone were to install a block on advertising, and people still wanted my time, but I had to pay very large amounts of real cash, how long do you think I'd do it? Wouldn't it be more rational for me to stop writing entirely and, instead, spend the money by take a couple extra trip to Disney World with my family every year or let myself go crazy in the Brioni boutique? Why would I continue to transfer money from my own household to technology firms if the activity wasn't valued by people enough to at least break even? There is a limit to everyone on how much they'll give before they realize it's not a good use of opportunity cost. I only installed ads on this site a couple of years ago after the bandwidth costs exceeded $3,000 per year. I ran a calculation that showed that if I, instead, broke even and put the cash in an index fund, at average rates of return, I'd leave my heirs another $4.2 million by the end of my natural life expectancy.
TL;DR: People are mostly rational. Incentives matters. To think you are entitled to other peoples' time, effort, and bandwidth for free is not only an almost narcissistic level of entitlement, it's also woefully naive as to the second and third order effects of the action.
archont
August 16, 2013
Replying to Joshua Kennon
If I pull out my ukulele (assuming I had and could play one) and start producing content, investing my time and unique creative abilities on a public street, is it theft when a pedestrian stops for a while, nods his head to the rhythm and walks away, without leaving a tip?
Is it theft when I turn off my TV or mute the volume when the ad segment is airing?
How about supermarket product samples - taking each sample that catches my eye, without having the slightest intention, no matter how good the product, to buy it?
If the economic definition of theft classifies those acts as such, then it's so broad as to be useless. Here I am, writing a post, composing a counterargument to yours, creating content which will (arguably) enrich your site, if not on it's own then by virtue of your surgical rebuttal. Yet for this effort I won't be compensated in any economically measurable way - just your response. Even though one could make a case that this is economical theft as well, I expect no compensation.
That being said, I understand the reality of running a website. The time and costs involved with it's setup and day-to-day operations. If running a website or blog generates no revenue it becomes a liability - sucking up time and money, producing soft results at best. If all users start blocking ads, the internet will be split between a paywall - with high-quality content on one side, and junk that's not even worth appraising on the other.
And if the goal of your website is mostly profit, paywalling it - selectively or in whole - may be the right thing to do. If it is to serve as a public soapbox of sorts, based on what you said, I think you've got little to worry about in the immediate future.
We will start seeing solutions to this problem soon - for it's a technical problem with a technical solution. Neither legislature nor appeals at a site's users will bring expected results. There will always be people like me - who for the sake of their own convenience will block ads, forcing the other users to see more lucrative, bigger, flashier ones or reducing a site's earnings outright.
Joshua Kennon
August 16, 2013
Replying to archont
Before I say this, realize that I am not trying to convince you to stop using Ad Blockers, nor telling you that you are committing some horrific moral evil. My primary interest is that I believe, strongly, in the wise council offered by Richard P. Feynman who warned, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
If you are going to do something, you need to be honest with yourself about the nature of the activity. Self-justification leads to unclear thinking and bad decisions later. You should be your harshest critic, no one else.
That aside, you seem to be confused about the differentiation of two economic concepts: Imputed costs vs. Explicit costs. They are not interchangeable.
Economic theft occurs when you create a non-consensual extraction of value in the form of an explicit cost on a counterparty by violating the implicit quid pro quo agreement upon which the exchange of goods or services was predicated.
That is not meaningless. All of the conditions must be met and a rational person can examine a situation and determine if they have been.
Theft involving imputed costs, on the other hand, are the domain of philosophers and ethicists as there are not always clear answers, leaving a given civilization to decide among the accepted social norms through long periods of debate. They cannot be easily identified. The nature of the engagement between the parties is sometimes unclear.
The example you provided of a ukulele player used an imputed cost as the perceived harm.
The correct parallel here would be if the ukulele player booked a private venue. The venue owner required him to pay a fee of $1 for every person that attended the concert. The ukulele player agreed to play for the audience, but does so if everyone attending watches a 5 second Coca-Cola ad to offset the cost. It's an implicit contract: He gives you free music, you at least pull your weight and don't take his funds. You decide you want to listen to his music, you are aware of the expense he will have to pay, but decide you don't like ads so you sneak in the side door. He still has to pay your $1 cover charge when the head count is made. This is an explicit cost. There is a very real, identifiable loss here - $1.
Had this same ukulele player been performing on the street, there is no explicit cost; only an imputed one measured by the time he is (knowingly) risking by performing for people in an age-old activity.*
In the case of your cable company, you've purchased the right to press the mute button because, if you are an average American, you're paying $936 per year directly to the cable distributor, who divides that money among the networks, to offset their explicit costs. The mute button is a feature provided as part of the service that they expect you to use and that is modeled into the price they charge for the subscription. You could mute adds all day and you still would have covered your extraction of value from the supply chain. There is no non-consensual behavior going on here that violates the terms and agreement between the counterparties.
Supermarket samples are an explicit marketing cost that often the distributor, not just the store, has decided to pay with the full knowledge, and acceptance, that a substantial portion of the people who have the samples won't purchase the product. You aren't sneaking into the freezer and eating the food without their knowledge. Whether you realize it or not, once you try that product, you will be far more likely to buy in the future, even if you vehemently deny it. (There is an enormous body of marketing research on the psychology of brand exposure that show just how lucrative this can be.) Thus, the sample provider is willingly, and knowingly, paying your expense as the value you provide is eating the product. It's not an accident that firms like Nestle and Kraft do these promotions. It's not an accident that Procter & Gamble and Unilever pay a lot of money to have their laundry detergent visible in that new romantic comedy. You're providing plenty of value for the exchange, even if you aren't aware of it. There is no non-consensual extraction of value from the counterparty.
For a website offering free, unrestricted content in exchange for showing advertisements, modifying the site design through the use of plugins or scripts to strip the ads from the page while still generating increased expenses in the form of bandwidth represents a non-consensual change to the nature of the agreement and has a very specific, identifiable financial cost that could be calculated to the penny based on your activity. Thus, it is a form of economic theft.
If you feel fine about that, great. But, again, even if only to yourself, denying the nature of the economic activity in which you are engaging is the enemy of clear thinking. Every site you view, someone is writing a check to cover your activity.
That's why, again, the concept of leaving a comment on the site doesn't work. It's a false equivalence. In this case, the content isn't provided on the basis that you comment. You can choose to take on the imputed cost yourself (the time of writing a message), but there is no explicit cost to you.
I don't disagree with you that the best way issues like this are resolved are through technological innovation.
*Footnote: This is why I say that imputed costs are the domain of philosophers and ethicists. Some people strongly believe the scenario of imputed costs you illustrate is an example of theft, though I have not argued that in our conversation. The first time some friends and I flew to New York as teenagers, one of the girls in the group stopped to watch a violin player in Central Park. She took a picture and started to walk away before a middle aged mom with her kid stopped and scolded her, saying she had just stolen the time of the performer, enjoyed his music, but not thrown anything in the case. There does seem to be a Kantian Fairness expectation among a large percentage of the population, meaning that violating it would have social consequences. Thus, if you don't pay at the time, you will end up paying if enough people think you are violating some sort of compact, resulting in negative economic consequences for you down the road. That sort of thing wouldn't be necessarily problematic in the discussion about technological choices as they mostly remain private and hidden from the general public.
weixiluo
August 24, 2013
Replying to Joshua Kennon
Your argument that using an Adblocker is a form of theft is correct in the sense that one does indeed put time and effort into providing "free" content that is subsidized by the revenue generated by the ads. Indeed, I've whitelisted your website in Adblock as soon as I finished reading your discussion with archont.
However, that being said, the implicit contract between the content creator and the viewer is only based on the current standards of society. As you have mentioned, if a significant portion a viewer base decides to use Adblock or some equivalent, like RSS readers that have integrated ad-removing technologies, than it is fair to assume that content creators will have to expect that a significant portion of its users will block ads, meaning that they will have to expect those who doesn't block them to subsidize the earnings for the whole viewing base. It may take 5 years or 50 years for ad-blocking software to gain a large enough base to be considered "significant" (something I consider along the lines of 30%) , but odds are that it will happen eventually.
It is similar, but not exactly the same, to credit card companies that get their revenue primarily, but not solely, on the interest paid by a its debt-laden customers, although somewhere between a third and half of credit card users never owed a penny in interest, but they still received all the benefits coming from owning a credit card, namely convenience, security & fraud protection, and often times, a nice cash-back on purchases.
Maybe I've grown too much accustomed to Quebec's National Library that provides freely more than 4 million documents including 1 million books, with free unlimited access to Value Line and a handful of incredibly useful services, but there is a compelling argument that most information (corporate or government secrets and such things being the obvious exceptions) and knowledge should be free, especially in a globally connected world. Libraries are forced by law to provide free content to everyone, but the author still doesn't get compensated a cent. Wikipedia is by far world's largest encyclopedia, yet it doesn't and will never show a single ad. Khan Academy is another such example. Although the vast majority of authors, writers and blog owners still rely on advertisement for their revenue, the mere presence of quality websites relying solely on donations makes the act of blocking advertisements much more morally acceptable.
Also, even if blocking ads is considered a form of theft in today's standards, there is much less stigma to stealing from an "implicit" type contract without any consequences than stealing from an "explicit" type contract, such as a product in a store, due to mental models and behavioural psychology.
I do respect very much your content on your blog and about.com ; they have changed my life, and I certainly do not disagree with your arguments that adblockers steal bandwidth, but whether you like it or not, technology has allowed end users to freely block ads on any site they want. In some way, ideas in a society change so that there will always be outliers and topics reaching tipping points. A century ago racism was the norm, but now racists have become a tiny minority of bigots. Society's views on information diffusion over the web is certainly a changing topic, and it touches not just revenue models vs open-source free content diffusion, but also other topics such as privacy and piracy.
Guest
January 30, 2017
Replying to weixiluo
> Wikipedia ... will never show a single ad.
Funny how things change. Although it's not an ad, it's one of the most annoying "ask for donation" windows I've ever seen...
Joel
August 15, 2013
Replying to archont
I agree if the ads were done tastefully and proper, like a side wall, there would be no need for ad-blocking software. I don't know if you remember the early, wild days of the consumer internet, early 90's, but many places had so many pop-ups and ad walls as to make their sites unusable.
There needs to be a middle ground. Text-ads and other more phishing programs and viruses need to be outlawed if the public is expected to allow other ads to flourish.
You can make internet rules but if the public has reasons and means to avoid them, they can and will. Re: Napster, megaupload, YouTube music/videos, rise and fall of AOL, Excite.com (early search engine more than 1/2 the screen was ads), etc.
lokgp
August 15, 2013
Hi Joshua,
Thanks for sharing this how to make money guide.
I think that if you work on making money online long enough, either through writing, retailing, forum, or providing services, sooner or later you will find out about those elements.
Certainly, this post gives a big head start to many starters or for those for are currently running low on page views, and income. And that is really helpful.
I am guessing that the most important thing is in realising how long will it take for the efforts to bear fruit. Would you kindly share your experience and views on how long will it take to work on the project until it brings in some okay income in net profit, say perhaps $10,000 per year, which is significant for many online bloggers and retail starters.
It would sort of frame their expectations into a better perspective. Making money online is no lottery ticket. I am guessing that usually, the real problem is, people just give up in improving whatever they wanted to do as they have never expected the payoff to be so far away, and the effort is far greater than they initially started. Wanting to get the lottery dream.
Perhaps something on, how long approximately it will take before you start earning a decent income, how many hours per week it took you, the amount of effort it required, when to make improvement, when to keep on trying, and when to give up. Maybe it is too much to ask from you, but, well, I can only ask. 🙂
Like many things in life: It is simple but not easy.
Joshua Kennon
August 17, 2013
Replying to lokgp
There are too many variables to be able to answer that.
1. What is the speed at which you write?
2. What is the topic that you desire to cover (medical or finance sites are going to be more profitable than a fan site for some random Japanese Anime television show)
3. How good are your community building and search engine optimization skills (the latter of which are constantly changing; they resemble nothing like when I started)
4. How are you monetizing the site? What model are you using.
If I were to start a site from scratch, with no existing community, and no tie to my name, but it were my full-time job (this would not be the best use of time, by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm attempting to answer your question), I'd have a real problem if I couldn't reach the five-figures within 12-18 months, at which point I'd have a base of income that would keep rolling in even if I didn't work on the site. It would probably be shorter, but that would give me a huge margin of safety.
But it's probably not a fair comparison because I've done it before and know how it works. It would be like asking a car mechanic how quickly you could change an engine. The answer needs to be calibrated.
lokgp
August 17, 2013
Replying to Joshua Kennon
Then I guess the next logical question would be:
1.) What would be the path you would rather take, to be making the best use of your time, if you are starting to make money online again? Cut a deal to run a website for a local manufacturer or retailer where you will take a 5% cut on all sales done through your website, and let them handle the shipping and delivery? Retailing?
And
2.) What would be the be best use of your time, if you are not restricted to only making money online?
Matt
August 15, 2013
From the perspective of an online retailer who wants to build a solid business with stable income, what are the ways you get a sustainable competitive advantage (and thus stop the "amazon effect" where especially in books people browse the bookstore the order on amazon because it is cheaper)? It is hard for me to think of any meaningful advantages other than competing on price (which ruins margins unless you have a cost advantage) unless you stock exclusive or difficult to find merchandise (unlikely unless you have your own manufacturing company). Is there a way to add value in retail that you could give some tips on?
Scott McCarthy
August 16, 2013
Replying to Matt
Re: Showrooming:
I wonder how long it will take for brick and mortar retailers to replace/cover manufacturer bar-codes with company-specific proprietary systems (perhaps encrypted RFID that can't be cracked by smart phones?) to make showrooming more difficult.
lokgp
August 16, 2013
Replying to Matt
I think I can answer this for Joshua. The answer is:
1.) To produce an unique product or a unique service - aka something uncomparable or very subjective.
To create something new and unique which is not comparable to any other product. Let say liquid soap. Don't sell products from BodyShop or Colgate-Palmolive. Source it from somewhere, pick a new packaging, add more features to it, or add-value to it, brand it a different name, make it uncomparable. No one will be able to match your price. Mark it up 8 times if you go the luxury model. Mark it up 3 times if you go the mass market model. I think Joshua will say: Selling the product is our target, manufacturing is just another tool to get there. Certainly if you have talent in chemistry and able to produce a proprietary liquid soap is great, but it is not a pre-requisite if you want to be retailing.
In books: Sell your own books, maps, authors licensed to you. Usually, the volume is so small, prices will be higher. Sell your own clothing line.
2.) Get exclusive rights to products.
Usually, these are higher priced goods, probably on the luxury side, where the manufacturer still runs distributorship model, where recommended retail price is applied throughout other distributors, in order to maintain its status. Or if it is a new product trying to enter new markets using distributorship model. It won't last forever, but it is good enough a return. They could be lower priced products as well, a generic pill etc. Or an exclusive license to reproduce the product for sale to customers.
3.) Customization
You can't mass sell a highly customizable product on Amazon. Etc: Software programming, web designing, law, forming a company, accounting, custom coloured dolls, scribing, translation, gardening.
4.) Niche
WallMart is great. Amazon is wonderful. But their focus is on wider mass market. Sell something with a theme, eg: magic swarovski beads, retailing everything on earth with red dots. So if someone wants a clothing, a bedsheet, or picture frame with RED dots, your store is the place to go due to your large and complementary collection. Your competition is likely to come from some other retailers working on the same niche.
5.) Sell a product or service which is price controlled either by government or association limited by location.
It is not like to find housing developers competing to produce and sell houses with 5% pre-tax margin. They probably agreed somewhere that they will keep a minimum 25% pre-tax profit on all projects. And agreed to compete in other ways. Ever wonder why dental care did not fall in prices compared to groceries even though there are more dentist now than ever before? Say flowers, free shipping within certain area codes. It would be much easier for owners to agree on a price. Eg: Cement manufacturer, brick. Building material.
I don't really think lowest price maker takes all model is great for the world, but reality is such.
Odai
August 18, 2013
Replying to lokgp
"Ever wonder why dental care did not fall in prices compared to groceries even though there are more dentist now than ever before?"
I don't think this is due to lack of competition. Food is so cheap because machines have taken over most of the tedious, time-consuming tasks that humans had to do in the past (sowing, picking, de-shucking, etc), allowing farms to make more food with fewer employees.
In contrast, dentistry still requires years and years of expensive education, and you have to incentive the job with a high salary to convince people to spend years in dental school.
In the future, machines powered by artificial intelligence may very well replace human dentists, lowering the cost. Of course, an economy with artificial intelligence would be vastly different from what exists today, so that's more of an academic discussion than anything relevant to today.
lokgp
August 18, 2013
Replying to Odai
It is true automation cut cost for most manufactured items.
But have you ever wondered why, with so many dentist graduating from different nations coming over to United States to work as dentist and to later start their own dentistry practice, that dental care is still expensive?
Another way to look at it is this way. Homebuilders, pumbler, wiremen, are all heavily skilled jobs. And you have so many people going over to college to get a degree to end up in a office job. Who are the ones replacing these aging carpenters, construction worker, brick layers etc. In some countries, cheap labour from neighbouring country comes over. They live cheap, they eat cheap, they have a cheap salary. Very soon, as the skill they provide is so much cheaper, it becomes a job that is undesirable by usual citizens, who would then go to college to get qualified for higher skilled jobs. Same goes for waste collector. Cheaper labour just brings the prices down and down, and dominated by lower wages foreigners, and the job soon gets shunned for it low pay and highly labouring jobs.
Why isn't dentistry the same? These foreigners paid less for their degree, they live cheaper, they saved up more money, they are less popular due to their skin colour or accent, so for them to compete, they charge lower fees. Then they would life on the top floor of their dentistry practice, cutting off commute - no need for car, taxes, gasoline, and housing rent. They have their college children help out in the practice during school breaks. Their cost of living is probably half of the usual dentist. And they can always afford to charge less, fill up their dentistry with more clients etc. They can also run a barebone dentistry offering basic services, so prices for basic services will fall and become very affordable to the masses, and the more expensive full service dentistry will have to branch out to newer products and service to offer higher end or more advanced dentistry service.
But prices is not falling as greatly.
It is a very similar to problem faced by car manufacturers. GM was doing great business, then Ford comes in and produce super cheap cars. Then GM have to produce better cars to get a higher price and margin. Then the Toyota comes in and start making cheaper cars with such high end spec, then GM have to start making luxury cars (product differentiation), then Toyota does the same thing with its Infinity series. Then when GM goes down, Toyota wins, then Chinese car manufacturer comes in and beat the price of Toyota, and on and on, and that kept car prices steady with more features, better milleage etc.
Look at healthcare, dentistry, prices goes up and up. There is some kind of barrier of entry there or a gentlemen's agreement which is preventing them from competitively destroying each other. It was the same thing with Ms. B with Nebraska Furniture mart, when she said "I buy my carpet for $3.00, and I sell it to my customers for $3.60. How much more you want me to rob my customers?" When others are selling at $6.00. Immigrants who give up their standard of living, can make prices low, absent any barrier of entry such as certification, or member of association such as BAR, or an unknown Gentlemen's agreement (That's how we have always done it. Everyone makes a profit.) RC.Willey did the same thing to win customers while trying to sell from his home in a farm.
Kim Matheson
August 15, 2013
Hi think the true key to understanding how to make money online is that it is like any business and should not be viewed as a quick fix to any financial situation. Most people have a tendancy to jump onto google search and end up with pulled in by internet marketers who promise you can make money on auto pilot which simply is not the case. Like any business it takes time, structure and a plan. 🙂 Good post
Joshua Kennon
August 17, 2013
I think there are probably two things going on here.
1.) He is an innovator and probably believes he can add value to the business by restructuring it in ways the old owners couldn't or wouldn't due to social and cultural factors, and
2.) He is a bit of an optimist and activist, and I see him wanting to preserve one of the legendary institutions of the free press in the United States. This is a man who, along with his wife, agitates for public policy changes and gives large amounts of money to better the country.
I would imagine he will come up with some sort of Kindle-integration delivery system that serves as a subscription model now that he has the power to really do it in a big way.
On the same topic, I do not own any Washington Post stock directly, but the largest shareholder is Berkshire Hathaway, which is one of my family's largest securities holdings, thus I've always paid attention to its 10K filings as it is indirectly important to us. While I think the family that runs it, particularly the CEO, is a very good man about whom everyone gushes, the business activity that now makes up a bulk of the firm absolute disgusts me.
Perhaps some people disagree, but here I what I believe based on my own sense of values and understanding of the financial statements: The "new" Washington Post - the business sans the newspaper - is essentially in the business of signing up low income people with no experience or exposure to higher education to college degree related programs they cannot afford. They sell hopes and dreams, then get these kids hooked on large amounts of non-dischargable student loan debt that will haunt them for life (which doesn't matter to the new Post, as it gets paid regardless once the papers are signed). The dropout and academic rates are problematic in my view, which is one of the reasons some of the student loan reformers want the debt-to-graduation rate to be factored in to see if a school can get money from these types of loans as it would put debt-mills out of business.
There's only one other firm, an agricultural business, that I find more morally reprehensible. Reading the 10K of the Washington Post the past few years gives me this sick feeling in my stomach because I know what they are doing, and understand how the incentive system has blinded them to the harm I believe they are causing. It's bad for society. I wouldn't criticize them publicly because the paper itself is an important institution but now that the paper is leaving, I hope to God that Berkshire liquidates its shares of the new Post company. It would be far less morally bankrupt if we were to own tobacco fields. At least then, there is no misunderstanding as to what is happening on the part of the customer. It's a cynical business that, I believe, preys on the weak and inexperienced by offering them false hopes and dreams that, in my opinion, cannot be supported by the results being produced.
I'm glad Jeff Bezos bought the paper. I think it will be in good hands with him.
Steve
February 5, 2015
Replying to Joshua Kennon
Might I inquire about what agricultural business you are speaking of? I have my guess but curious to see your actual thoughts.
DVY
May 2, 2015
Replying to Steve
Its a toss-up between Monsanto and ArcherDanielMidlands, if I was a betting man.
Steve
May 11, 2015
Replying to DVY
My guess was Monsanto. I am 99.8% we are correct.
michael bian
September 2, 2013
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CJ Deguara
July 15, 2014
Excellent article, clear and straight to the point. I also agree with you that whilst blog ad revenue is a nice to have it would e extremely flawed to focus on it as the main earner. I personally generate revenue from other streams and let the blog revenue pile up for a rainy day. I am wondering however if like myself you fin the Pareto principle to be true - 80% of revenue from content is generated from 20% or less of my content - however I also believe that if the other 80% was not there I would actually not receive such high traffic to 20% of pages.
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March 21, 2017
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