Advertising does not work as a business model for online publishers. With the exception of search and classifieds, page view inventory receives less than $1 CPM. Usually less than a ten cent ($0.10) CPM, actually.
So if advertising doesn't work, what does work online? The answer is ecommerce. If you want to make money online, you have to sell something.
Building an online audience is a tremendously personal endeavor, and it takes a special individual. To build the audience, the publisher must be able to entertain, to educate and to help. What is the product an audience gathered in this fashion is most likely to buy? I think it is the online publisher themselves. SpeakToMe offers online publishers the ability to sell direct interaction between the audience and themselves.
How does it work? The audience comes to your blog or website and sees you in the SpeakToMe widget. Your presence is thereby established. If someone in the audience has a specific question to ask you, or they wish to speak to you directly for any reason, they can click on the SpeakToMe link and be connected to you over a regular telephone line on a per-minute basis.
This blog is, of course, an example of how this works. Anybody can create a blog like this one, with their own set of blog posts and their own formatting. Get started by signing up as an expert over at SpeakToMe. There are no out of pocket costs to the expert -- SpeakToMe takes 10% of the revenues you generate from your audience. The payout after credit card costs, broadcast fees and telephony charges will still be over 80% to you, the expert.
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