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For a while it looked as if this would actually work. Advertising sales were brisk, fueled mainly by the ever-increasing number of dot-com start-ups that were traffic-poor but cash-rich.

These start-ups thought nothing of spending millions to plaster their banners all over other, more popular sites.

Once the dot-com party was over however, and people sobered up to the fact that the vast majority of these start-ups were never going to turn a profit, the advertising dollars dried up almost overnight.

The result was a glut in online advertising space and a massive collapse in the price websites were getting for those annoying banners.

Within 12-18 months, many of the new breed of online publishers had also gone the way of the dodo and a point of equilibrium was reached -- although ad prices were still far below those seen just a couple of years before.

However, now that the Net continues to grow (albeit at a more sensible pace), some analysts are predicting that web publishers will once again be able to enjoy some good-times.

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The prediction is that with the continued growth in e-commerce, more and more advertisers will be chasing a relatively fixed amount of advertising space on the web.

Once the law of supply and demand kicks in, this will see publishers receiving more money for the advertising they carry.

This is great news for all Net users.

For a start, it will mean that we'll probably see fewer crappy ads for MLMs and for those spyware aps that masquerade as smiley-faces for your email.

But more importantly, it probably means we'll see an increase in the quantity, quality and variety of free online content.

The real winners will be those publishers whose content leans towards a more vertical market rather than general news sites.

This is because all good advertising is targeted and it's difficult to target advertising on a publication which covers too diverse a range of topics and is also subject to regular updates throughout the day.

I notice, for example, that the Google Ads space on the NZ Herald often carries US Public Service announcements -- a sign that even the mighty Google can't find any suitably targeted ads for a site with such broad coverage.

By comparison, my own jet engine website seldom carries these ads because its content is well defined and well suited to accurately targeted placements.

So, if you want to get into online publishing and actually see some return on your investment (even if it's just an investment of time), choose a nicely defined subject which appears to have good advertiser support and create a site that is filled with content related to that subject.

In fact, I predict that there'll soon be a new genre of portal-sites which are built solely to generate revenues from Google's AdSense product.

Choose a subject, buy yourself some web-space, get a decent domain name, spend a couple of weeks trawling the web for the best links, write a few pages of your own material, throw some AdSense advertising on there, promote that site properly -- and you've got a nice little earner.

Sure, *one* such site won't make you a millionaire -- but if you've got time to burn and sufficient energy, I'd wager that you could produce several such sites a month. Within 6-months you'd probably be earning enough to quit your day-job and spend most of the week sunbathing by the pool.

All those sites will be working for you 24/7 and, if you do the job properly, will require only occasional updating to remain current and highly ranked.

Even if each site only returns a couple of hundred dollars in ad revenues, collectively they could soon amount to a very comfortable income.

So there you are -- don't say I never give you any good ideas.

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