There's a great deal of variation in goodsuccessfulcontent web sites. The gist of these sites varies from humor to practical to editorial
opinions and beyond. It's hard to generalize. But successful content sites typically do tend to fall into at least one (maybe more than one)
of the following categories:
The site is humorous and makes visitors laugh.
The site provides a useful free service.
The site is an online magazine or newspaper.
The site provides opinions in the form of a blog or blogs.
The site provides practical information.
The site sells a popular product or service.
The site services a community and provides communication tools for that community.
The only thing these kinds of sites have in commonand there are undoubtedly other ways successful sites can be categorizedis that they
draw traffic (either focused or broad). Therefore, they are good sites and are excellent venues for web advertising. In short, they use web
content to make moneyand making money with your web site content is the topic of the first part of this book (and likely a subject you
care about!).
Humor itself, as is well known, is in the eye of the beholder (and by itself as a category has infinite variety), but an example of a
humorous site that is popular and makes money from contextual advertising is Googlefight , http://www.googlefight.com, a site that
compares the Google rankings of two terms such as "God" and "Satan."
Humorous sites tend to have short half-lives. Like stars going nova, they can draw tons of traffic for a short while and then fade from
view. For example, when Christo's Gates, an elaborate and well-publicized art installation, were up in Central Park, New York, a number
of parody sitesCrackers Gates, Nicky's Gates, the Somerville Gatessprang up. These sites were quite popular for a week or two, but
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when the Christo art installation was taken down and the media publicity surrounding the installation faded, so did interest in the parody
sites.
Today, everyone is bombarded with content in a variety of mediums. Things come and go quickly. For the most part, humor sites that are
static , meaning that the content doesn't change, publish content that can be expected to fade from public interestwhich means that to
make money from this content you must be prepared to strike while the iron is hot, because it will only be popular for a short while.
