Profit from web pages

[Crazygolfer]

How do non retail sites make money on the internet. For example the answerbank .co.uk.

[xyzzy@bok]

People who make a business out of spying on a computer user's browsing habits to sell on to other businesses who mean to profile everyone for many nefarious reasons, have amongst their weaponry such diverse elements as cookie and spyware. the cookies are uploaded to your pc without your permission when you visit a site such as theanswerbank and next time you visit the cookie or spyware reports back to its creators with info from your index.dat [a file hidden on your pc by microsoft] So the busier a website who uses this spystuff is the more money they earn from such companies as adviva hitbox atdmt bluestreak doubleclick valueclick mediaplex tribalfusion and of course Gator though answerbank aren't employed by Gator they do yous many of the others i mentioned; not only is it an invasion but it slows down your surfing experience and bloats your pc with 'living spam'. Oh and there's popups and banners too these also create revenue for the site but not quite so insidious as adviva etc. ok. If you don't care for this kind of traffic you could download and use freeware 'cookiewall' by AnalogX which will let you choose which cookies to allow on your pc [because some cookies are useful like your webmail cookie or your Google preferences cookie] .

[jenstar]

Some simple things you can do to to protect your privacy and improve your surfing experience: (1) learn about your HOSTS file and how to use it to block adservers. (2) Get a decent firewall. (3) Delete your cookies and internet cache regularly. (4) Get "ad-aware" and "Spybot", two free programs that will identify and remove spyware from your computer. (5) Don't use Internet Explorer. I recommend Mozilla (which is free, stable, and easy to install, and has built-in pop-up blocking and a superb cookie management feature) but there are plenty of others out there too - there's bound to be one you'll like better than IE.

[BadBob]

To answer the actual question, You may notice above your question that there is an advert. People pay to advertise and revenue is gained from that. This can work in 2 ways, firstly on a simple display fee so I pay the website say �30 a month to show my sign. Or the second way is I will pay your web site 10p for every person who clicks on the link and visits my site. The more popular the web site the more money you can command. So for example to advertise on Google its many thousands of pounds a month (just had a quick look and they are talking 10,000 to 30,000 a month). One thing the internet has done as opposed to TV and Billboard advertising is that it has given the advertiser direct feedback on the number of people actively using the advert, so with a TV advert you can't really tell if spending �10,000 on a campaign is any better then �100,000 but with the net you can see the number of people comming in via an advert link and therefore see if your getting value for money.