Specialty Web publishing, on the rebound

Anyone that published a small Web site than pulled a few hundred thousand visits a month circa 1999 knows that you could make an OK dollar producing such a site. It was a blast because if you did it, it was probably something you were really excited about, and it was a labor of love that proved to be a hobby with income.

Those days went away pretty quick by late 2001, and they haven't been that pretty since. I've been running one site or another like this now since 1998. Back in those days I had a shared hosting account for around $50 a month (NT hosting wasn't cheap, you know), and I got like 2 gigs of monthly transfer. I barely cracked 50,000 visitors a month at the time.

For a short period of time in 2000, I co-located a server with my shady ISP. That was a disaster. I eventually rented a box at CrystalTech. It was expensive, but worry-free because they have the best support in the business. As my bandwidth costs continued to rise and my total cost was around a grand, I couldn't find anyone else that could rent a Windows box that didn't have a horrible reputation. I reluctantly got a T-1 to my house in 2001, and had it for two years. Aside from the sting of buying my own licenses and a router, it was a rewarding experience, and kind of nice because I couldn't get DSL or cable at the time.

In 2003 I ditched the T-1 (cable Internet finally came to town) and rented a server at a certain host in San Francisco. All was going well until a power problem knocked out half of their network, put my box off-line, and the excuses started rolling. Sure, they had redundant power and generators, but this was caused by a spike from the utility (and it was all their fault, so stop calling us). I was pissed, and regretted leaving the T-1, even though I was paying less than $300. They were in no hurry to even meet their SLA refund promises, so they were out.

I then migrated to ServerMatrix, which for the most part has been outstanding. More than a terabyte of monthly transfer and under $200. I went down twice early on when a router for my particular segment of the network crapped out. I was annoyed, but got the credit for it and reminded myself I wasn't shelling out four figures for a T-1 anymore.

So expenses, even for a popular site, are well under control these days. A part of me wishes I would've gotten into porn back in the day (something classy and real, if porn can be either of those), because today your profit margin would be through the roof with the reduced costs of running a popular site.

The reliance on advertising is still a factor, but the ad market is slowly coming back. It's filled with pop-ups, yes, but I honestly believe that the dollars will shift to larger in-page formats (I think the “leaderboard” format is great) when XP SP2 ships with the blocker. I don't make enough to live on, because my sites' appeal is a little too narrow, but at least I'm making back all the money I spent in the T-1 days. I could be doing even better if I got out there and tried to do some selling. I could probably add two or three grand a month, but I hate selling. The ad rep firms, try as they might, never seem to be able to close the deal.

I also get a little from subscription revenue. That helps when ad dollars are soft. Contrary to popular belief, people will pay for online content if it's something that they really enjoy. There's a certain gratification that comes from that because it shows that someone out there genuinely appreciates what you're doing for them, and you get compensated for it.

The point of this rant is that there is potential to make a living off of a specialty content Web site these days. Expenses have gone way down while revenue opportunities are slowly creeping back up.