Webupon

Many people realize that websites are an ideal way to make some extra money each month. The first idea that comes to mind would be opening an online shop. This for most people would be very hard to make successful, especially if they are at work full time.

The other way to make money from a website would be to use ad revenue. The unfortunate thing about ad revenue is that you need a reasonably high amount of traffic each month to your site to get any sort of benefit. Ad revenue will normally come in the form of contextual ads, which are through companies such as Google and Yahoo (to name a few), these sites target the ads to the content that is on your page. You may very well earn a lot of money with these sorts of ads if you have a website that is in a well paid market (people will pay higher prices for the ads, when the products they are selling is highly priced, e.g. cosmetic surgery). But for the most part, the ads are paid $0.01 to $0.10 per click, and it is per click, which means a visitor needs to click on an ad for you to get paid.

There are also various banner advertising companies, but if you have a low traffic website you are even more likely to fail, as these companies normally pay per transaction, so you earn a percentage of the sale they make through the banner on your site.

However, there are some companies that are starting to take advantage of these low traffic hobby sites, by offering a static banner and a set amount per month. The simplicity of this is great, and it works brilliantly for those who make very little revenue off their sites. You as the webmaster, provide the advertising company with a list of URL’s (some have a set number such as 3 or 5), and they then match you up with one of their advertisers, and provide you with a link or a banner, which you place on the URL you provided. And at the end of each month they pay you the agreed amount for displaying the ads.

At the present time I am only aware of two companies that operate this, one being The AdNetwork, who will pay £5 per site, per month, but you must display 3 banners, and there is no maximum amount of sites that you can have. And Matched.co.uk who pay £3 per banner for up to 5 pages, with a maximum of 5 sites. So with matched you could net £75 per month.

These are the only two I am aware of at the moment and they both pay in GBP. If you have a site with contextual advertising you could also use these companies as they don’t interfere with the advertising. This is a great little earner for websites with low traffic.