How to Make Money Online: Publish Freely Available Information in a Better Way

One of the web­sites I have found in my excur­sions on the Web is Seat­Guru.  It is a travel web­site that gives detailed infor­ma­tion about best and not so great seats on every type of air­plane.  It is a great help while book­ing a flight to get the seat that you pre­fer, no mat­ter which plane you will be fly­ing on.

The his­tory of Seat­Guru is more fas­ci­nat­ing to me, how­ever, because it demon­strates that a great busi­ness can be started by a hus­band and wife by pub­lish­ing freely avail­able infor­ma­tion in a more usable way.  Matt Daim­ler and his wife took the sim­ple idea that some seats are bet­ter than oth­ers on air­planes and expanded it to a web­site so impres­sive that it was bought out by Expe­dia TripAdvisor.com for over $100,000 within 6 years!  Incredible!

So here is a time­line of SeatGuru’s success:

1. Matt launched SeatGuru.com in Octo­ber 2001 with a sin­gle, color-coded seat­ing chart of a sin­gle aircraft
2. By sum­mer 2002, Seat­Guru had charts for six of the airlines
3. After one year, in Octo­ber 2002, the site was receiv­ing 200 visitors/day and was mak­ing a few hun­dred dol­lars a month, but was still only a hobby for him
4. By Sum­mer 2003, Matt was able to make $100 on the first day he started using Adsense
5. In April 2004, almost three years after launch, his wife and joined and dou­bled the busi­ness to around $6000/month
6. By 2006, five years after launch, SeatGuru.com was mak­ing $10k-$20k per month and fea­tured 40 air­lines and 275 airplanes.
7. In March 2007, Seat­Guru was bought by Expe­dia sub­sidiary TripAdvisor.com for more than $100,000
8. By Jan­u­ary 2008, the site was being viewed 6 mil­lion times per month

What can we learn from the Seat­Guru success?

I would like you to observe that it took awhile to gen­er­ate the nec­es­sary traf­fic needed to make sig­nif­i­cant amounts of income via Google Adsense.  So don’t become dis­cour­aged if your web­site does not bring in the income you desire at first.  Matt and his wife patiently worked at it for three years before the were mak­ing enough money to quit their day jobs.

This arti­cle from MoneyMoguls.com will give you an idea of how much he was mak­ing in Novem­ber of 2007, prior to his sale to Tripadvisor.com.  And accord­ing to the Wall Street Jour­nal,  he spent $100,000 ren­o­vat­ing a home that he sold for well over a mil­lion dol­lars dur­ing that same year.  Not bad!

Another amaz­ing fact is that their site was launched after the “Inter­net Bub­ble” burst when every­one said that make money by adver­tis­ing was over.   Here is an inter­est­ing arti­cle about the Matt’s adver­tis­ing approach and how he chose Adsense to gen­er­ate con­sis­tent income that increased as Seat­Guru traf­fic expanded.

How can you imi­tate this success?

Per­haps you can present the same infor­ma­tion in an even more usable way than SeatGuru.com.   Many of the seat lay­outs of air­planes are avail­able on air­line sites.  Use Google search term “seat lay­out” and you will see plenty of them.

Take SeatExpert.com for exam­ple — their site presents the same infor­ma­tion but more con­ve­niently shows it when you type in the flight you are going to take rather than the less easy way on Tri­pad­vi­sor Seat­Guru.   Like Seat­Guru, Sea­t­Ex­pert was founded by a father and son team — not a large corporation.

Here are some other pos­si­bil­i­ties of the other travel needs I can think of that you might take the same approach as Seat­Guru and Sea­t­Ex­pert in build­ing a rev­enue pro­duc­ing website:

• Is there a bet­ter way to present air­line flight times?
• What restau­rants are in each air­port and what is their exact loca­tion?  What times are the restau­rants open?  What is on the menu at each restaurant?
• What hotels are near each air­port and how much do they cost?
• Where are the best park­ing lots (spots) at an air­port?  How far is each park­ing lot (spot) from the air­port terminal?
• Where are the near­est gas sta­tions to the air­port? (espe­cially use­ful when refill­ing rental cars).  What is the aver­age price of gas in the area?  Is it bet­ter to get the rental car refu­el­ing option?

You don’t have to con­fine your­self to travel ideas.  What are the best seats in a football/baseball/soccer sta­dium?  Where is the best place to be dur­ing a con­cert at a local arena?

This kind of “out of the box” think­ing can help give you “seed ideas” for build­ing a suc­cess­ful web­site like SeatGuru.com.

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