Websites for fun and profit

Rubber Bullets

FH is my second home
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Hi,

A colleague and I are considering setting up a website related to radiography and radiography technique. This would be an educational site and of interest to student radiographers, qualified staff and some public, a fairly small demographic, though not limited to thsi country.

We do not see this as the next Friends Reunited, and are not intending to become dotcom millionaires, but it would be nice if the site could make enough money to pay it's own way.

Buying a domain and running a site are relatively cheap, as long as traffic is low, and I guess making money is easier if traffic is high. Our problem is that the images we would want to use may be expensive. I do not want to steal images from other sites, and so the costs of licenses may be prohibitive.

Is there anything that sites of this naturecan do to make money? I'm not keen on banner ads, though this may be the only way, but another thought I had was to make the images on the site reasonably small and low quality and to make larger hi res versions available to registered (and Paid) members. I have paid $20 or so to emedicine.com for exactly this privilidge, so it can work.

Are there any other ideas? Advice?

Thanks

RB
 

DaGaffer

Down With That Sorta Thing
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If its got educational value you might want to check to see if you can get a government subsidy/grant to do it. Or possibly tie it into a teaching hospital/university? I'd have to understand more about the image rights before I could give you an practical advice on doing any kind of subs site.

Forget ads; unless you've got direct contacts (equipment co's, pharma companies etc.) who are trying to reach your audience, you're going to end up on an ad network with a buttons CPM ad-rate.
 

Shovel

Can't get enough of FH
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At the small end: Throwing in the odd Google ad never hurt (graphical banners are evil though). You can also make small change with things like Amazon referral links, which for an educational site might make some sense if linking to other dead-tree materials for students to buy.

Hosting is cheap as you say: Dreamhost.com is my current favourite. They give you about 20Gig of storage and 1 terabyte of bandwidth each month. About £70/£80 a year depending on the strength of the dollar. I haven't ever seen anything that compares.

Critically, they also have an affiliate system that pays $98 per referral, or a % of all future fees: The net result is that you only need to refer a couple of people a year and you effectively never pay for hosting. (Note: That's not an affiliate link above, btw. That would be cheeky and bad. I do have one if anyone wants to use them and give me beer money, but I digress).

As for larger scale earnings: If you're doing educational resources - particular stuff that requires a license, why not have a two-tier service?

On one level you can provide useful, free resources. Perhaps containing less of your premium-images that you have to buy, or only provide low-resolution versions of the images. Then you have some sort of small-fee membership for access to all the content that costs you money, high-resolution downloadable images and any other desirable extras you can think of.

It's hard to build too much stuff into a premium site when you start from nothing, but I suspect there are ways you can tier your content. What about prepared teaching notes or lecture slides? Even if they're essentially refactored versions of your article content, it's an extra service to offer that some may find very useful and worth paying an annual fee for.
 

Rubber Bullets

FH is my second home
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Thanks DaGaffer

DaGaffer said:
If its got educational value you might want to check to see if you can get a government subsidy/grant to do it. Or possibly tie it into a teaching hospital/university?

I work for a hospital, and a University, but we would kinda like to go it alone on this, if it is feasable. The Government subsidy sounds possible though.

DaGaffer said:
I'd have to understand more about the image rights before I could give you an practical advice on doing any kind of subs site.

We envisage the site using 2 types of image. Firstly photographs of 'patients' in position for each view, with x-ray tube image receptor etc. These we can take ourselves and will hold copyright for.

The problem comes from wanting to use real radiographs to illustrate what is required for each prejection.

We take tens of thousands of x-rays a year, but issues of confidentiality etc mean that we can't simply copy and use them. Of course each one will have names removed, but this does not mean that the issues are resolved. At best we would have to go through hospital ethics approvel to use even anonymised images.

The option is that there are companies that hold libraries of x-ray images, both normal and demonstrating various pathologies and injuries. It is these that we would need to either buy up front or pay a license for.

What I don't want to do is go down the route of this site for instance, some of whose images are used without permission.

Hmm actually in finding the above link I alos found this which could be very useful.


DaGaffer said:
Forget ads; you're going to end up on an ad network with a buttons CPM ad-rate.

No idea what the last bit means, but it sounds bad :) I really do not want to use ads.

Thanks for your help

RB
 

Rubber Bullets

FH is my second home
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Thanks Shovel,

I was writing my above post when you posted, not ignoring you ;)

Some good ideas in there too, I like the idea of the tiered system, and think that may well be the only way to go. Amazon links could be a possibility, there are certainly many books on this subject available (for instance, this is one of our core texts), often at high cost.

RB
 

Penguin

Fledgling Freddie
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CPM = Cost per 1000 impressions. (How much you're paid per 1000 page views).

Recently started a website myself to give Adsense a try - Seems like interesting stuff, placing the adverts well is quite simple - Then it's just getting the traffic.
 

Maljonic

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This is right up my alley, I've been buggering about with this that and the other affiliate stuff for 4 years now. :)

Google adsense is definately the best way to make a bit of money to pay for your hosting etc.

Banner ads aren't worth it, you get bugger all money and they just distract your visitors and irritate them.

You get next to nothing from Amazon too, but if you're going to link to books you may as well make it an Amazon affiliate link seeing as loads of people link to Amazon anyway for books. Amazon do sell DVDs and all sorts of other stuff too, but the books are the main things still.

If you're going to write lots of unique content, that is stuff written in your own words and not copied from somewhere else, you can't go wrong with Google text add - just put them over to the right hand side like they appear in Google search results then they don't get on anyone's nerves, distract from your text and a few people will click them that way.

It's very slow at first but it does pick up as you add more content and the pages are indexed, plus the money can go straight into your bank account so there's no annoying currency exchange faffing about with checks, or paypal charges like you get with other affiliates.

After a while if your site gets well indexed and pages ranked, which means bugger all really but some people think it does, you can sell text links that go on the bottom of your front page, or subpages, for about 8-10 quid a month each - but that's quite a way down the road.

I personally start my new sites off on the personal package at 34sp.com, it's only £15 a year for 50mb and you get 1 MYSQL database; you only need a few pence a day from Google to cover that and, hopefully, by the time you've filled the webspace you'll be making more than enough to upgrade the package to a larger webspace account.

Also, is there any scope for taking some of the pictures yourself? That's always best if you can.
 

Rubber Bullets

FH is my second home
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Thanks for the replies guys, it's looking quite hopeful.


Maljonic said:
Also, is there any scope for taking some of the pictures yourself? That's always best if you can.

Yes, all the photos will be ours with no copyright problems.

The potential problem comes with using x-rays that in effect belong to the NHS

RB
 

GReaper

Part of the furniture
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Any real need to charge for it? If it's going to cost you less than £100 per year in hosting, or even less on some of the cheaper hosts, you could just do it for fun. People paying for such images would have certain expectations, you'll have to put in a large amount of effort in to make sure it's worthwhile etc. Maybe keeping it free would keep the website fun for you.

If the copyright on all images belongs to you, perhaps you could allow them to be free for personal use only and offer licenses for anyone who wants to commercially use them. Maybe place a large Creative Commons watermark as well as the website logo or URL on every image, so if anyone printed out any images it would be possible for other people to recognise where it came from. Keep high quality untouched originals safe incase anyone does actually want them.

If you're really desperate to cover the costs of the site, a few text ads may be okay, but please put them in a decent place as not to piss off your readers. I'm just one of those people who would rather see a high quality site without adverts, begging for donations or asking for payment to see something more. As long as it doesn't cost much to host then it isn't really worth bothering chasing after a few pounds. :p
 

Rubber Bullets

FH is my second home
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Day to day running costs of a site like this would be low, and easily funded as a hobby. It is the potential cost of x-ray libraries that may be prohibitive and require funding from the site, it is these images that I wouldn't own the copyright to. I absolutely agree with the resistance to advertising, and will avoid at all costs.

There is certainly a place for a site like this even though it is very much a niche requirement.

RB
 

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