Part 4 : Revenue & Domain Names

You don't have a privacy policy at your sites - is there a special reason for this?
I've never really got around to putting one in place, and since the only place I collect anything that might be construed as "personal" information is on the discussion forums and the Guestbook - which are entirely optional parts of the site that visitors can read anonymously and must explicitly opt to post to - I still don't see any particular urgency to set one up. If one of my advertisers tells me I should have one, I'll change my tune pretty quickly though!

What other revenue options have you explored in your website family, and how have they worked out?
I've never sold products or services directly, but I have made use of affiliate schemes where I couldn't sell ad space directly to advertisers. Generally the results have been pretty poor: all the space is "full" but I only get about $1 CPM on average for these kinds of remnant ads.

How do you see the future for directory type websites which rely on advertising and sponsorship?
I think there is still a lot of room for more Emailaddresses.com type sites (and I don't mean about free email!) - that is, niche sites that really specialize on one very narrow topic and explore it almost to death. With the right choice of initial topic you could do very well from such a site. At the same time, this is not the kind of thing that will grow into a 5 or 10-man operation. For that, you'll probably need more dynamic content, or an eCommerce element to your service.

If you had one piece of advice for a budding webmaster, what would it be?
Get a site up NOW and then worry about how to make it successful later! I have revised all my sites at least a half-dozen times each (not all improvements have been positive, and I sometimes go quickly back to a backup copy of the site) but until the site is out there you're getting no visitors and no feedback.

You also hold several hundred domain names. Isn't the domain name gold rush over?
I hope not. There is clearly a lull at the moment, partly because of the uncertain economic climate surrounding dot-com companies, but also because there is no efficient mechanism to connect buyers and sellers. The market is saturated with sellers desperate to unload names, and with no way to contact buyers. Things are bound to pick up once a smoother trading system becomes available - Network Solutions' recent move into the domain name aftermarket is already one very positive step in this direction.

And any tips for the would-be domain name speculator?
Just this: domain names are not as scarce as you might have been lead to believe. In other words, just because it ends in ".com", doesn't mean that it's valuable! You need to think WHY a commercial company would pay real money for your name... if you can't answer that question INSTANTLY then don't register the name, and brainstorm another instead.

What are your future plans - where do you see yourself in a year's time?
I hope to have a couple more sites up and running - but I'm going to be going for a more hands-off approach i.e. looking for sites that are very automated to make the update burden minimal. I hope that my sites will be paying the mortgage on a nice house in Cambridge (UK)!