Danlew.com

There is clearly a big diference in putting a site together for the long term or for the short term.

Alot of the big players that develop lets say a search engine or social networking site have a huge advertising budget because they know what they are getting into which involves huge competition, even if they are innitially playing with other less popular social networks lets give an example of Facebook vs say Friendster, hi 5 etc, there is still alot of marketing needed to prove to others that lets say Facebook is better.

When it comes to one man marketers or smaller agencies investing in smaller key area sites these days they have no option other then to focus on smaller niche sites.

The divide between the two areas are getting wider and wider, as the bigger companies like Google and Microsoft have so much power that they can buy their way into almost anything. The niche sites keep pounding away harder and harder as the only thing that is on their side is endless hours of time and effort to put into their work.

High risk, high return sites can be a lot more rewarding for the long term and can even end up as a public company on the stock market and making billions of dollars, where is the short term low risk sites gain thousands of dollars and is a lot more guaranteed.

This then leaves middle men sites like forum community sites, article sites, and sites that are related to webmaster, design, seo, travel which gain profits from affiliate programs, advertising and memberships.

Other sites that quietly make profits are the sites which are involved in porn and gambling. Other niche areas such as “buy today only” schemes and other quick sale sites are slowly weeding out.

Here you can see that the top 30 alexa list contains around 15 sites that are all related to the big competitive niches such as social networking, search engines, video etc.

Long Term High Risk High Return Sites:

• Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu)
• Social Networking (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace)
• Blogging (Blogger.com, WordPress)
• Video Sites (Youtube)
• EMail Sites (MSN)
• Encyclopedia (Wikipedia)
• Shopping (Amazon, Ebay)
• File Sharing (RapidShare)

Short Term Low Risk Lower Return Sites:

• Weight Loss
• Stop Smoking
• Hair Loss
• Nokia Phones
• iPhones
• Wii (Nintendo)
• PS2 (Playstation)
• Religion
• Politics
• Soccer
• Fashion
• Auto

There is some odd successful sites and industries in between all this give and take. When Twitter became the talk of the town everyone started registering twitter domains and putting together  twitter background sites for example. Then developers started making money from facebook applications, they were and still are a great money maker. You can thrive off other popular sites success for some time also. The beauty about all this is there is always a way to make money online big or small.