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Not good ideas but lucrative: porn, pills, casinos, rebelling fraud, diet scams, Make Money Online, etc etc. Oldies which add value and continue to make money:
by patio11 15y ago
Not good ideas but lucrative: porn, pills, casinos, rebelling fraud, diet scams, Make Money Online, etc etc.
Oldies which add value and continue to make money: affiliates (travel, mortgage, credit cards, insurance, etc continue to print money, though barriers to entry are much higher than they once were). Lead gen remains a multibillion dollar industry.
There are many companies with six/seven/eight figure sales of unsexy software, not all of which is SaaS on a monthly basis yet. (Though it probably should be :) ). Time tracking, invoicing, collaboration, and all the other usual suspects for freelancers each support more than a dozen companies. Business productivity/communication/collaboration tools. There are thousand niche things you'd never think of if you didn't love a vertical to death. (e.g. Solving the problems of multi property landlords... with software. There's one guy whose supports four families with a very specialized spreadsheet wrapped in a Swing app.)
Traditional web page hosting continues to make money. (Not everyone loves VPSes or AWS. Your local bakery has to get on the net somehow...) There are ecosystems around e.g. wordpress themes and shopping carts for getting the Fortune Five million on the Internet. These support marketplace sites, affiliates, etc etc.
Niche publishing plus ads remains lucrative in many sectors. If you dominate the Internet for Christmas cookie recipes, that is about equivalent to a full-time job as a cookbook author. Every similarly sized field of human endeavor makes someone the 68% that Google isn't taking.
E-commerce still exists. Pick something you can buy: fishing rods, for example. Someone makes a living selling fishing rods online, I'll guarantee you.
- user24 15y agoYou've hinted about the difficulties with affiliates before[1], can you elaborate on this? I'm starting an affiliate-supported business as a spare-time project and would love your thoughts. [1] "Don’t look like an affiliate. Google is very ambivalent about affiliates" - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/08/06/landing-page-design-tips/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/08/06/landing-page-design-tips...
- patio11 15y agoBig Daddy G basically sees most affiliates as bugs which, if fixed, would entitle them to an extra 100%+ on the purchase at issue over what they're getting currently. This results in a frenemy dynamic because affiliates also spend $$$$$$$$ on AdWords. The space is pretty deep, I suggest reading on it if you care about it. In fact, it is an oversimplification to say there is one affiliate space, because there exist affiliate models which look as different as "startups" or "megacorps" do. Mint is about as different from most CPC arbitrageurs as Heroku is from Airbnb or McDonalds is from IBM. My accidental knowledge about the space comes from hanging around with SEos for too long. Many of them make their money that way, since it offers a compellign way to monetize marketing skills without needing to have a product/business of one's own to promote.
- nerfhammer 15y ago> I suggest reading on it if you care about it Suggestions?
- chris11 15y agoI'd be interested in this too. Also what forums are high quality for seo?
- sagacity 15y agotry http://www.webmasterworld.com http://www.webmasterworld.com for deep down, in-the-trenches type discussions and http://www.searchengineland.com http://www.searchengineland.com for more editorially fashioned coverage
- paulhauggis 15y agoI agree with almost all of what you said. But, I can't believe that time tracking is really that lucrative. Before I was on HN, I was on the JoS boards (I know you were also there). I can remember a time when someone would debut a new time tracking app every week. I feel like this market is more than saturated.
- patio11 15y agoTalk to Amy Hoy - her time tracking app grosses more than all three of my businesses combined and is growing like something growing very fast.
- spIrr 15y agoAnd how is that still possible? If there is huge a variety of time-tracking apps, how can you possible acquire a decent amount of customers? Verticals?
- _neil 15y agoI'd guess by having a quality product with good design. Time tracking is definitely over-saturated, but Freckle is a simple, powerful product with great design. That makes it makes it much easier to stand out.
- y0mbo 15y ago_neil is right. Freckle is simple (you can track time without the hassle of creating a project) and powerful (the multiple ways you can see your data is awesome, especially the "pulse" screen) with great design (its very pretty). That said, there's more features I'd love to see, but they are constantly improving the product, so its only a matter of time.
- ahoyhere 15y agoIf you (or, okay, I) can create a new product which has certain selling points, and gain quite a lot of customers, how is the market still considered "over-saturated"? I make my living exclusively in "over-saturated" or "nobody will pay for that" markets. Which so far has worked out just fantastically. My first foray into an "over-saturated" market was a Mac news, opinion & tutorial site back in the late 90s. Every single person I talked to said the market was over-saturated, that nobody would read it & more importantly, I wouldn't get any advertisers. They were all wrong.
- spindritf 15y agoWhat is "rebelling fraud"? I'm asking out of purely academic curiosity. Is it rebilling fraud? Scammer charges people additional (usually higher than initial) fees they didn't consent to?
- berberich 15y agoI wonder if he meant rebilling fraud.
- slouch 15y agoI think he meant rebilling.
- gigantor 15y agoI believe it was meant to say rebills (in affiliate slang), the act of billing your credit card automatically for another service/product term. Frequently used in the Acai berry juice fad where they would send you another scheduled shipment automatically and bill you for it, and in online dating sites where they bill you every month continuosly if you don't explicitly cancel. While unethical, it is not necessarily fraudulent since many times the rebill clause exists somewhere in the TOS/contract in very fine print or some obscure form.
- dutchbrit 15y agoI wouldn't consider porn to be lucrative, unless you create the content yourself.. It's one big saturated market, unless you find a micro niche that hasn't been tapped into that much, I wouldn't really bother.
- phreanix 15y agoSeconded. I was just asked to project manage a porn affiliate site revamp. They were making $50k+/mo last year, but the niche is so narrow and well, frankly disgusting, that I'm having trouble getting any designer to commit.
- elliottcarlson 15y agoAre you looking at designers on the GFY forums (certainly not safe for work for those who aren't familiar with it)? If not look there - they will be used to even the craziest of niches.
- phreanix 15y agoThanks I actually just shot off an email to someone I met there. Totally forgot I had an active username on GFY.
- rhizome 15y agoIn my, ahem, limited experience, it seems like a well-constructed site is very much needed. Most have only the most rudimentary, earlier-this-decade, styles of filtering.
- itmag 15y agoI wonder if YC would take a porn startup?
- kappaknight 15y agoReally? I thought porn led the way in many of internet's advances. (i.e. secure billing online, video streaming, security, etc.)
- bilbo0s 15y agoI know this may sound like a dumb question... But is it true that people still make money in porn online? When is that business going to dry up? Aren't there 50 bazillion porn sites already? They can't all make money. I know this is a sample size of one...but I don't pay for porn.
- Cyranix 15y agoDirect subscription isn't the only revenue stream. I would imagine that ad revenue is a significant source these days.
- streptomycin 15y agoIf nobody made money on porn, no new porn would be made. But there is tons of new porn being made. That money comes from somewhere.
- flomo 15y agoMy impression is that's largely a nickle-and-dime business (at least on the production side), but the lifestyle attracts people.
- lnanek 15y agoI ran a site once with lots of community content. Moderators worked for free and were just picked from the forums. Site was able to use as much bandwidth as I could get. We even started letting people donate hosting accounts and had a mirroring script they could run to help handle the bandwidth consumption. So anyway, in my experience, traffic was easy to get and you'd make money if your revenue was greater than your bandwidth costs. Revenue came in from ads, donations, premium memberships with access to restricted areas and status in the forums, etc.. Re ads, pay per click is low, but affiliate stuff pays a lot - getting someone to sign up for a subscription to a high quality porn site nets big $$$ and there are always some people that have plenty of money and will pay more for better quality. So anyway, if you see any good deals on bandwidth with no adult content restriction, I say go for it! :)
- elliottcarlson 15y ago
- itmag 15y agoIs there a good "algorithm" for discovering these needs? Is it mostly CRUD software or are there more exciting opportunities? (Much of the draw of the startup dream for me is the chance to work on sexy non-CRUDdy stuff).
- HeyLaughingBoy 15y agoSee, I think that's the problem. There are tons of opportunities in the boring CRUDdy stuff because the startup minded all flock to the exciting ideas. And as a result, Joe the plumber doesn't get that app that would automatically tell him the best route to his next stop along with what tools to pull out of the van and SMS the homeowner that he's on the way.