For hundreds of thousands of people, the dream of making an Internet fortune works like this: Earn pennies at a time in exchange for allowing Google Inc. or Yahoo Inc. to place advertisements on a personal or small-business Web page.Take Andrew Leyden, former House Commerce Committee counsel and founder of a dot-com venture that failed, who started PodcastDirectory.com, a search engine for podcasts. As the site’s popularity rose from a hundred hits a month in 2004 to nearly a million now, Leyden started making the equivalent of an entry-level government worker’s salary — $30,000 to $40,000 a year — simply because people clicked on ads. That allowed him to work at home in Chesapeake Beach, Md., trying to make more money by attracting still more traffic to his site.
“I went from literally 26 cents a week or something like that to several dollars an hour,” he said, by using Google’s AdSense software, which solicits bids from marketers who, in turn, pay to run ads on his site.
No comments yet.