E-Commerce Sites:
Many of the most successful web businesses make their money as e-commerce sites : by selling goods or services. Advertising on
these sites is a by-product (you might say, a product by-product). To name just a few examples:
Amazon.com is the department store of the Web, selling, either on its own account or for affiliates, everything you can
imagine.
eBay is the world's greatest flea market and auction community, with a great business model since it doesn't need to take an
inventory position in the items sold on its site.
ETrade , Schwab , and other online trading and investing sites are among the greatest revenue generators on the Web.
Gambling sites successfully part "players" from their funds.
The only thing these sites really have in common is that they make money by selling something and that they draw traffic (in some
cases, such as eBay and Amazon, lots and lots of traffic).
Making money from advertising is not really the business of this kind of site. These sites are big businesses and are likely to be
advertisers on other sites themselves. In fact, if you work on behalf of a large e-commerce site, you may be interested in using the
AdWords APIs to create custom advertising applications as explained in Part IV of this book.
Still, it's natural to look for additional revenue sources, and many e-commerce sites do sell advertising, although they all try toor should
try totake care not to let the advertising interfere with their primary goalselling products or services onlineor with their brand. For
example, you can buy placement for a book or other product on Amazon. These ads show up as similar items when you are checking out
(or considering a purchase). It works pretty similarly on eBay. You can purchase contextual advertising on eBay, but only for your
products or "store" on eBay itself.
E-commerce sites besides Amazon and eBay may sell ads based on impressions (also called CPM, or Cost Per Thousand, advertising)
such as banners used for branding purposes. They are very unlikely to sell ads on a pay-for-click basis (also called CPC, which stands
for Cost Per Click) because they want to keep traffic on their sites. Even CPM ads intended for branding purposes will be scrutinized
carefully to make sure that the branding message is in keeping with the goal of the e-commerce site.
From its very earliest beginnings, the Web has largely been about community. From a practical standpoint, involving a worthwhile
community is a great way to create content. You don't need to create the content yourself: your users do, for example by contributing to
discussion threads or by making syndication feeds available.
Site owners can use community to leverage their content and to create sites that are valuable to users because of the involvement of the
community.
