Best web based idea

Fiftyshades

What is the best web based idea, website for instance?

I would like to start to make a bit extra to pay the bills.

paddyrg

If it was easy to do without any ideas or experience, everybody would be doing it - without an original idea or niche, you're on a hiding to nothing and will end up spending more on your hosting and 'SEO' than you make back. There will be plenty of 'experts' along the way who will take a fee first though, and this is down to the fact that people think there's free money on the internet if they 'start a website' who get suckered in.

Think about it - if it was easy, why wouldn't the government set up 20,000,000 sites to pay off the national debt ;-)

oldtoolie

<<What is the best web based idea?>>
How about a website offering free advice on saving money?

Moneysaving-millionaire-Martin-Lewis-sells-Moneysavingexpert

Kaybenson

Oh My God

Martins had done really well

I have mixed feeling though..... Happy for him buttttttt

catandy

If you do decide to go into the website arena - beware all so called 'experts' and read/ study and do as much of the 'donkey work' you can as possible. there's an awful lot of 'sharks' out there ready to charm an arm and a leg for their services and the nature of the internet means these people are remote and you have next to no chance of verifying the standard of what they do for you or getting money back if what they charge you for is actually detrimental to your online business - buyer beware!

shmeeko69

Fiftyshades wrote: »

What is the best web based idea, website for instance?

I would like to start to make a bit extra to pay the bills.

It would be very difficult to say that something is the best, as people have different ideas of what works for them and is it for business or just a bit of fun?

You have to decide an area which suits you and stick with it, keeping your content fresh and interesting and if you want to monetise it then, there are various ways in which you can approach this.

InsideInsurance

Best ones at the moment are evidently the most successful - Google (inc YouTube etc), Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, eBay etc

Evidently you cannot create a mass market version of any of these ideas yourself and expect to do well without an amazing new spin on them (in which case it is really a new idea) or a multi million pound marketing budget.

Online businesses are just a business and require the same amount of planning and effort as an offline business. People seem to think that just because you can download a few templates for free and get a site running in a couple of hours that making money online is easier than offline. Arguably it is harder as if you start a florests in your local high street you have competition from maybe 2-3 others. Start one online and you have competition from hundreds if not thousands and no natural footfall

paddyrg

InsideInsurance wrote: »

Best ones at the moment are evidently the most successful - Google (inc YouTube etc), Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, eBay etc

Just for info, youtube in 2009 managed to LOSE half a BILLION dollars a year. It's an error to think the web is free money for all. Amazon posted their first profit in something like year 6 of business, before that they lost cash hand over fist. There is no easy gimmick to any worthwhile kind of free money

InsideInsurance

paddyrg wrote: »

Just for info, youtube in 2009 managed to LOSE half a BILLION dollars a year. It's an error to think the web is free money for all. Amazon posted their first profit in something like year 6 of business, before that they lost cash hand over fist. There is no easy gimmick to any worthwhile kind of free money

Year 1 profitability is not how I would define the "best" business and even subsequent submitted accounts can be ropey.

At the end of the day Google paid $1.65b to buy YouTube, if it had been me that set up that site and Google had even paid just a 10th of that (£101,890,000) I'd have been fairly chuffed even if the P&L showed a loss

paddyrg

InsideInsurance wrote: »

Year 1 profitability is not how I would define the "best" business and even subsequent submitted accounts can be ropey.

At the end of the day Google paid $1.65b to buy YouTube, if it had been me that set up that site and Google had even paid just a 10th of that (£101,890,000) I'd have been fairly chuffed even if the P&L showed a loss

Heh heh indeed - year 1 lost a heap of cash, as did years 2 onwards. Year 4 (whilst under google's ownership) still had an (estimated, publicised and not denied) $470M loss as the gap between ad-rev and costs was still so high. There are no later estimations/projections, but I would imagine the ratio of costs/losses has shifter a bit to lose less per video play - but not hugely.

The problem is lots of UGC (user-generated content - ie mostly crap or worse) which costs money to store, but no advertiser wants and it is accelerating. Sure, the cost per petabyte may be reducing, but the number of petabytes is increasing exponentially. Costs are still very real at that level. Unavailability would wipe out the userbase quickly, so the datacentre replications etc are technically incredibly impressive - they have some fabulous engineers.

What I am saying is that just because something is big online, you cannot extrapolate that it is a money-spinner. Billion upon billions of dollars have been ventured by VC's, some get a quick sale and speedy return, others lose the lot. More lose the lot than make a million. BT, Marconi etc were massively wounded or killed with dotcom startups. Friendsreunited cost ITV about a half-million quid of losses. MySpace has been a lemon for Murdoch. Facebook has been a lemon for most investors already. Twitter hasn't made a penny yet. Yes, people know the brands and the brands provide great service, but many are losing money hand over fist.

That's why I suggest they're not great role models for a one-person non-technical startup to emulate unless they have some REAL money backing them to dominate a market and HOPE they work out how to monetise the traffic. Sure - have a great idea, find a VC to back the development, and sell it on pronto and you're onto a winner.

Or get a business model that involves topslicing a real cash transaction (ebay, amazon, hailo) by making things easy for people - then get a backer for a few years whilst you develop the app and build the service base. But a home website hoping to make decent money with little-to-no work isn't going to do anything, it'll just be more background noise on the internet, and it's not short of background noise.

The Hailo guy is going to be VERY rich I think - a cabbie who came up with the idea that you should be able to book a real black cab to the door at a moments notice on credit card etc. Simple pulling together of a few ideas, works well in London, rolled out in Dublin, and rolling out shortly in the USA with big backing. He'll be minted, and rightly so. Come up with a tool that solves a real problem and someone to back it, by all means, just saying the world doesn't need yet another crappy affiliate site.

InsideInsurance

Evidently there are those that want to set up a business that does turnover a reasonable cash profit and is a long term sustainable project and there are those that prefer to set up ideas and make their money by selling the business (or parts of) rather than seeing it through to the end themselves.

Whilst USA corporations dont have to declare directors pay I personally would suspect that despite Twitter etc making annual losses that the guys that set it up aren't living on the breadline - Wikipedia puts Jack Dorsey's estimated worth at $1.13b

You are probably more likely to make a "profit" (I use the term loosely as company profits and personal incomes are not exactly linked as per the above) if you aim small, in a safe established arena and just find a small niche to target etc but then you are also unlikely to become worth $1.13b by doing this.

Personally, the "best" idea does not mean the safest (despite the fact I work in insurance)