How to Make Money on Your Website and Mobile App

What is the Best Way to Make eMoney?

If a company has a decision between website or mobile app, what is the best way to earn money? What is the best strategy?

Website
Depending on the business it seems that advertising or a paid subscription is the best way to go. It seems that using Google Adsense you can earn up to $1500 a day or $10,000 a month. Webrevenue.org is a great website for learning more about this topic.

Build Traffic
To make money you have to first build traffic. Webrevenue states that the following factors help.

1. social site
2. connect to other sites
3. study the"repeat visitors" to the site
4. study stats using sites like Quantcast

Webrevenue has an interesting formula:

(Regular Monthly Visitors + (Regular Monthly Visitors * Rate of Growth)) = Next Month’s Visitors.

The author seems to say that a site will do well depending on how much effort you put in to the content.

Business Models
A list of ecommerce business models can be found on DigitalEnterprise.

• Brokerage
• Advertising
• Infomediary
• Merchant
• Manufacturer (Direct)
• Affiliate
• Community
• Subscription
• Utility

Wired also features a great article on business models with a breakdown of how many business use each type of model. The majority, 34% uses advertising.

Mobile Apps
Mobitech states:
""In mature markets, the mobile Web, along with associated Web adaptation tools, will be a leading technology for B2C mobile applications through 2012, and should be part of every organization's B2C technology portfolio." (Gartner, 2010)"

Given the disadvantages listed for the iPhone, the startup cost, and the 30/70 split of revenue, developing a mobile app does not seem worth the cost unless you have money to burn. That is the impression I get from Mobitech.

On the flip side TechCrunch states that top iPhone apps can make $400-5000 a day. There is also less competition in the free apps area.

Selling Aggregate Data
Selling anonymous aggregate data is one way to make money. CloudAve discusses the controversy over Mint.com selling aggregate financial data. Besides the Mint.com discussion I was not able to find much information about selling aggregate data, which would imply it is hard to do or not as common.