Project Case Study: Musterville

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

Categories: Ad Revenue Driven Websites

I thought of a great idea for an addition to my section on Ad Revenue Driven Websites, I can talk about experiences with my own personal projects and why they worked and why they didn’t and really open up to readers on their comments on what I did right and what I didn’t.

Idea

The general idea was to pull data from normally unspiderable business databases. These databases would contain business information on smaller cities and smaller markets. These cities and towns don’t have business directories because the normal web entrepreneur doesn’t see a market for a potential reach of 1000 people. The data would be manually enhanced and individual community websites would be launched automatically from the backend.

Resources

Great backend. Databases could be launched in a second and full sites can be generated given that the data was present.
Great frontend. Nice looking front-end gives the site more credibility

Why It Worked

Untapped market
Easy to launch multiple websites once the data is mined
Not-so-net-savvy users means high CTR on ads
Hitting a huge database is like hitting a goldmine
Ethical content. The content you’re using isn’t copyrighted
Individual websites for each businesses is great in terms of SEO

Why It Didn’t Work

Getting the data and developing scripts to mine the data is time consuming
Low inbound links means it’s difficult to get Pagerank, you need to start with high Pagerank, or buy links
Finding the databases is difficult