With the actual real estate bubble going through some rough patches, many people are quick to back away from investing into the market; moreover, people are beginning to take that capital and put it into “virtual real estate.” The crazy success that many people have obtained solely through the internet is nothing new, but the ability to achieve those monetary gains is increasing daily.
For those that are unclear, sites create value by building their traffic. As more visitors come to a particular site, that increases advertisement views, and as the traffic gets higher so does the cost of ad placement on that site. The hardest part obviously is redirecting traffic to your site.
Now communities or even neighborhoods, you could call them, have been developed to try and collectively build traffic. Some of these sites include:
The idea consists of you buying a page that has a certain topic. For example, you might decide to purchase the right to the word “money.” If that is available, then you will lock up that word and nobody else can ever buy that same topic. As the owner of the page you can now do whatever you want with it. You can compare this with purchasing actual real estate. Each page on the sites I have given cost a one time fee of $100. Most people combine blended advertisements and information on the topic that they secured.
How Do I Make Money?
As I mentioned, the goal of this community is to build up traffic and page rank collectively. In short, page rank is what Google uses in its search. The higher your rank the more likely your site will show up at the top of the searches. For instance, if you do a Google search for a celebrity you will see Internet Movie Database at the top or if you do a search for a topic you will see Wikipedia. The final goal is if someone did a search for money (the topic I used), then the traffic built up collectively should increase the page rank, thus, causing our money page to show up at the the top of the results page.
All this will cause our site to generate more traffic, and, as I said before, the ads that we have subtlety placed on our money page should bring in some monetary gains. Then eventually you should be able to sell your site for more then $100 (hopefully much more). Almost like flipping a house. We took a bland boring page, renovated it, and then sold it for profit.
Now there is great risk here. We are betting that in the future these communities will blossom, but if they don’t, then most likely we have lost our initial investment. I personally don’t feel like taking a risk on these sites just because there are so many of them and so few spaces at the top of Google searches, and I rather have my own space; however, there are some heavy hitters in the blogosphere that have locked down their pages.
So check out some up and coming neighborhoods or build your mansion. Either way buying real estate on the internet is huge hit right now.