# Making money off websites



## ship (Jan 16, 2006)

So it’s somewhat assured that when one has a website with membership, one might get a kickback or otherwise might make something from it. Otherwise the bloggers of the world might not have revenue. So how does this system work? In Dave’s case while he does not perhaps make much if anything of the website, does he need more donations to keep the website running given the amount of usage, or should he be paying off the members?  Expect this last part is not the case, but how do websites work in a money type of way? Baby needs new shoes, thus either donate or get more members for the guy with a bright idea.


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## Foxinabox10 (Jan 16, 2006)

I know through the Google ads there are several ways to make money. Everytime an ad is clicked by a legitimate, non-abusive IP address, payment is made based on advertiser rates. If someone downloads FireFox through the link on the bottom left, payment is $1. If someone sets up a Google ad account through the button at the top, payment is made as $100 comission when the first $100 if made by the person signing up through the link.


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## Radman (Jan 17, 2006)

Oh man, I just downloaded firefox off the mozilla site! I wish I knew that before hand!


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## Mayhem (Jan 17, 2006)

Radman said:


> Oh man, I just downloaded firefox off the mozilla site! I wish I knew that before hand!



Uninstall it and download it again from here!

Dave does it hard and from my understanding this is a labour of love and certainly not a means of paying the bills. Selling advertising would be one stream of revenue but as this site is focussed at high school tech, it is a fair bet that advertisers are not going to pay for space when most high schoolers are not in a position to place a big enough order.

Although, there is evidence to suggest that introducing brand recognition at an early age makes the person more likely to purchase that brand later on in life. In fact, Toyota have produced a comic book which promotes Toyota cars and it is pitched at 8 year olds. It will take a decade or more before we know if it will work or not.

Perhaps Behringer should buy up big in the advertising on this site!!


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## Foxinabox10 (Jan 17, 2006)

Unfortunately the FireFox thing only works on the first install of the software on a given computer and IP address.


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## Mayhem (Jan 17, 2006)

Ah, I see - well in that case:


Radman said:


> Oh man, I just downloaded firefox off the mozilla site! I wish I knew that before hand!



Uninstall and delete and then change your ISP before downloading from here!

Will that work?


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## ship (Jan 20, 2006)

Please note that this was more a question in general. I have absolutely no idea of why MSN as a home webpage allows me to use them for it when I have Comcast for a host. No idea before now of how or why the Google type thing works, much less ask geeves. 
When I hot websites like "this to that", I have no idea of if by my going to the website, the person somehow gets a kick back or if he or she is paying to keep the website alive. Otherwise if it's just a null thing. Remember at one point while with AT&T for a host, I had something like three or seven websites available as a membership thing covered in the regular monthly dues. On the other hand, should I have formed some type of website and it became as popular as this one, at some point I would have to pay for a website with more power or something. Or would I if all those viewing in some way as making a phone call were paying to use the line and part of that phone call to the website was in payment to the website wasting that person's time.

IN other words, I really do have no idea of how this whole internet thing works. It's post 1979 technology. Explain further please, though what has been said so far has helped.


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## Radman (Jan 20, 2006)

Mayhem said:


> Ah, I see - well in that case:
> 
> 
> Radman said:
> ...



Might not be necessary. Some ISP's change your IP once and a while. On dialup I believe you have a different IP pretty much every time you dial in! I'm so stupid. I just installed Firefox on a different conouter and forgot again. Meh.

Ship-

Howstuffworks.com might have something to help you catch up on how the whole internet thing works. I should take a look my self actually, I have very little knowledge on the topic myself.

On a side note, howstuffworks.com has great information on tons of stuff (except I think their articel on microprocessors should be rewritten by someone who doesnt work for Intel ).


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## bdesmond (Jan 20, 2006)

ship said:


> Please note that this was more a question in general. I have absolutely no idea of why MSN as a home webpage allows me to use them for it when I have Comcast for a host. No idea before now of how or why the Google type thing works, much less ask geeves.
> When I hot websites like "this to that", I have no idea of if by my going to the website, the person somehow gets a kick back or if he or she is paying to keep the website alive. Otherwise if it's just a null thing. Remember at one point while with AT&T for a host, I had something like three or seven websites available as a membership thing covered in the regular monthly dues. On the other hand, should I have formed some type of website and it became as popular as this one, at some point I would have to pay for a website with more power or something. Or would I if all those viewing in some way as making a phone call were paying to use the line and part of that phone call to the website was in payment to the website wasting that person's time.
> 
> IN other words, I really do have no idea of how this whole internet thing works. It's post 1979 technology. Explain further please, though what has been said so far has helped.




So someone like msn is making good money off msn.com. MSN is also a dialup ISP - you can pay them some number of $ a month to have the right to dial into their modem pools and then you have a route to what we like to call the Internet from there. DSL and cable are the same - you pay someone for your connection to the Internet. For the purpose of this discussion, we'll call this connection your "transit" link. Unless you happen to be what is considered a Tier 1 carrier (more on that later), you're paying someone for your transit, usually a higher tier carrier. As an end user at home, your ISP is the next tier up.

So, we're buying transit from someone, lets say AT & T for now. ATT is more or less what I would consider a tier 1 carrier. By this I mean that they generally don't pay for transit. Now, everybody has a definition of their own for who is tier 1, 2, etc. There is no list. Some carriers are generally accepted to be tier 1. So then how do you as an ATT customer get from your computer which is connected to an ATT router to lets say someone who is using Level(3) as their primary transit? In this situation, Level(3) and ATT likely have what is called peering connections, probably in multiple locations. When carriers enter into a peering agreement, they agree to exchange customer traffic at no cost. Usually there are stipulations such as whats known as cold-potato vs hot-potato routing, but, that's beyond the scope of this discussion I think. A tier 2 carrier usually buys their bandwidth from a couple of tier 1s (e.g. Level3, ATT, MCI, etc). They will have peering agreements, but, not such that they can get anywhere.

If you pull up a command prompt on your PC and do a tracert www.controlbooth.com, your comuter will show the series of routers data passes through between you and www.controlbooth.com and the latency from you to that router. When you get *s, that particular ISP has disabled ICMP on their routers (and you're SOL here). Lets look at a trace from me to www.controlbooth.com:


C:\tools>tracert www.controlbooth.com

Tracing route to controlbooth.com [69.73.172.20]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.129.161.2
2 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.128.1.36
3 <1 ms 1 ms <1 ms 10.128.2.34
4 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 66.158.94.13
5 <1 ms <1 ms 1 ms ge0-0.sob10.chicago.lincon.net [206.166.2.33]
6 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms pos-9-0-sob10-nap-sob2.chicago.lincon.net [206.1
66.9.117]
7 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms p6-3.hsa1.chi1.bbnplanet.net [4.24.203.65]
8 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms ae-1-51.bbr1.Chicago1.Level3.net [4.68.101.1]
9 38 ms 37 ms 37 ms so-1-0-0.mp1.Houston1.Level3.net [209.247.11.169
]
10 37 ms 37 ms 37 ms so-11-0.hsa2.Houston1.Level3.net [4.68.96.54]
11 37 ms 39 ms 38 ms unknown.Level3.net [209.247.109.114]
12 36 ms 37 ms 36 ms hou-rtr3-vl2.cyrusone.com [69.7.175.19]
13 37 ms 37 ms 37 ms vl2-rtr1.nocdirect.com [69.7.160.227]
14 37 ms 36 ms 37 ms siberia.nocdirect.com [69.73.172.20]

Trace complete.

The first few hops are within my network (10.X.X.X is reserved for internal networks). How does my ISP, Illinois Century Network know who to hand off my packets destined to controlbooth to? BGP or the Border Gateway Protocol is a routing protocol which every router which is on the Internet runs. With BGP, ISPs exchange routing tables and in the case of a router with wahts known as full tables, they have a next hop route for every subnet being announced. 

Lets say I own the IP block 129.21.0.0/16 (all the IP addresses on the Internet are assigned by IANA to a regional registry, ARIN in North America, which in turn leases IP space and ASNs to end users and ISPs). I happen to be buying transit from Level3. What I do is get an ASN (Autonomous System Number) issued to me by ARIN, and I setup a BGP peering with Level3. I announce the prefix 129.21.0.0/16 to Level3. I also ask Level3 to send me full routing tables for the Internet.

For redundancy, I also have an Internet connection from Cogent. I also announce my prefix (129.21.0.0/16) to Cogent, but, I add a special community to it to decrease the preference on that prefix. Cogent also sends me a full set of tables. Now my router has two sets of full Internet tables. One of the interesting things here though is that through things like the community that I added to my announcement to Cogent, I have different costs on the routes. When I go to send some traffic to a network, my router uses the least cost path. In routers around the world now, there are two routes to my network - these routers in term pick the best cost to them. In the event Cogent has network issues, or my BGP session goes down with them, tht route disappears from the global tables and everything comes in thru Level3. 

So if you look at the trace again, it looks like the company which is hosting controlbooth.com is using Level(3) as one of their transit providers. Most likely they have at least two, and via BGP my ISP (Illinois Century Network) selected the Level(3) routes as the best. 

Thats a high level how stuff gets from point a to point b, I have about 2000 pages of BGP material on my bookshelf - it's a pretty complex thing. Some statistics about the Internet routing table as of today according to the CIDR report:

176,919 prefixes (different networks) are in the full Internet tables
21,264 AS (autonomous systems) are announcing routs into the full tables
The US DOD (AS721) is announcing 91,312,384 ip addresses to the Internet (this is the largest number for any single AS) 

http://www.cidr-report.org/as4637/ - other useful stats

So, ship, unless someone locks down what IPs/subnets (aka prefixes) can access their site (like if ATT only wanted Worldnet subscriers to access their homepage), you can get to it. ISPs get money for the stuff they put on their customer homepages usually. Personally, mine is set to "about:blank" - nothing.


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## koncept (Jan 20, 2006)

Thats a lot of very good info. Thanks I am currious about the hot/cold potato stuff as that was never mentioned in my ccna classes, but as you said probaly not in the scope of this discussion.


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## bdesmond (Jan 21, 2006)

koncept said:


> Thats a lot of very good info. Thanks I am currious about the hot/cold potato stuff as that was never mentioned in my ccna classes, but as you said probaly not in the scope of this discussion.



We can talk about this too. This is def way out of scope for CCNA - passed that the other day actually. This is somewhere between CCNP and CCIE level stuff IMHO.

So, remember we discussed the concept of peering where two ISPs have a free interchange of customer traffic destined for each other's networks. Most of the time major carriers have multiple peering points. Chicago, New York, Denver, Miami, Seattle, San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Amsterdam, etc are all major places for this sort of thing. ISPs can peer anywhere they can get a link between routers, but, it tends to be major cities where they have presence. Seattle for example there's the Westin building which is what's known as a carrier hotel. It's all datacenter space (like 40 stories worth I think) where pretty much everyone is.

So, for the most part links between ISP routers on big networks are OC-* OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, OC-192 which are 155mbps, 622mbps, 2.048gbps, ~10gbps. Line cards for routers for these types of links are expensive, not to mention the cost of laying or leasing fiber for them transcontinentally and transpac/transatlantic. These types of links carriers have to be very concious of them running at or around capacity and modifying their internal routing to compensate.

The hot-potato vs cold-potato concept comes in when you combine peering and link capacity. As part of the peering agreement, ISPs have to agree who will run the traffic on their network for the most time. In a hot potato situation, ISP A hands off ISP B bound traffic at the first available peering point in their network. Likewise, in a cold potato situation, ISP A runs the traffic across their network until the last possible point on ISP B's network.


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