To ask you to explain how websites make money?

[Teenybitsad]

I don't mean shops etc....but those crappy ones which are just full of "articles" about a certain niche product or activity...why do I ask?

Because I write those crappy articles for a living...for other people ...and I have NO idea how the compnies who employ me actually make cash from what I give them. But they do because they keep coming back for more.

Adverts mainly.

Google Ads,that pay a penny or fraction thereof a click (Adcents).
We got about 700 quid off our website last month. About half of it to do with a single topic.

Don't ask mehow to set it up, DH does that side. I just write original content.

This might be interesting (I thought it was but then I have a website and would like to make money, yum)
AOL's Master Plan They're going all out on acquiring content - eg bought Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

Google ads mostly. Some would use affiliate links but the sites you're talking about use mostly contextual advertising.

You write an article about the best bottles for your baby. Someone searching for advice on bottle feeding will use google and evetually find the article you've written. The adverts on the site know that you're writing about bottles and that the person searching is looking for bottle feeding advice so the adverts shown are all related to bottles, bottle feeding and formula feeding. If the searcher clicks on one of the ads the website makes a small amount of money.

ragged £700 a month - time I set up a website!

Hmmm. My website makes me nothing, as it's hosted by Moonfruit and I've gone for the ad-free version. (Various reasons, but I didn't like what the ads were starting to promote.)

It's usually more like 300 quid/month, but some of the things DH has written about are very topical (we even had a Broadsheet journalist pumping us for leads!).

Wow ragged...your DH needs to teach mine a thing or two! Mine expects me to write the content AND know how to set it all up...I'm a techno-dimwit though!

Time to trawl.

Presumably the Google ads only record unique hits? Otherwise you could go on yourself for a couple of hours each day and frantically pummel each ad with the mouse to get endless imprints...

UnquietDad - Google are on to that, funnily enough!

And how do you get the ads on your website, do you have to try to sell advertising space or do they come to you?

You sign up with a Google ads account, put a piece of code on your website (easily done with blogger and wordpress) and the ads appear.

Do the ads still respond to the keywords on your site?

This was the reason I got rid of them - my site is writing/published-based, and the ads were, at first, for random things like saucepans. Then they started to be for so-called agents and publishers who charge a fee to writers, and print-on-demand services and so on. Making it look as if my site endorsesd these things.

Yes, they pick up on keywords. Our version just has a small number of text ads at the top (with a notice "Ads by Google"). So not in your face or looking like endorsements.

DH keeps track of what searches come to our site (this is also automated) and then tries to suggest likely topics to me on the back of what people searched for.

Which topics are generally too boring for words... but I try to pursue some of them.