A good way of making money is to sell things. But that is a way for a business to make money, not a site.
It has never completely gone away, but there was a time when instead of having ads, people thought sites should have shops. Newspapers would have shops. Sell mugs and pens. A lot of sites like news sites actually added them.
This idea never went very far.
Facebook and the like are here to stay n the internet. Even if Facebook itself goes out of business, it will be replaced. They are not a store. They do not magically turn their visitors into Amazon visitors by selling stuff.
Well, not to burst your bubble but there are many sites that use this exact business model.
One of the sites that comes to mind is homestarrunner.com - who have been doing this since they started.
Granted, it doesn't work for every business, but the fact is that if you create a service that your users genuinely care about, they will purchase your merchandise, because for those users, this enhances their overall experience.
It's a classic model that's taken straight from hollywood. Merchandising revenue is a HUGE factor in lots of productions.
You're limiting yourself. Selling things doesn't mean having a crappy web store with mugs in it. For facebook it means figuring out how to package and sell its massive database of golden marketing data. For Homestarrunner it's a matter of figuring out how to bring people into their in-group by uniting them with recognizable paraphernalia.
For you it might be something else, but it's almost certainly not mugs. Your comment boggles my mind:
> But that is a way for a business to make money, not a site.
If you are trying to make money with a website, that's called a business. Otherwise it's a hobby, which is fine too.
It has never completely gone away, but there was a time when instead of having ads, people thought sites should have shops. Newspapers would have shops. Sell mugs and pens. A lot of sites like news sites actually added them.
This idea never went very far.
Facebook and the like are here to stay n the internet. Even if Facebook itself goes out of business, it will be replaced. They are not a store. They do not magically turn their visitors into Amazon visitors by selling stuff.