How does a website like yahoo or facebook make so much money?

[Wayne R.]

I mean how exactly do they make money, i dont think its just the ads on these websites that generate all that cash, plus i have personally never pain a cent for yahoo or facebook, facebook doesnt even have ads, yet the founders of these websites are billionaires, where's the cash coming from? How does this work?

[Jon B]

advertising!

[Iviebelle]

It is all in the ads. Just a fraction of a page and you have millions.

[Keys]

Just as above. Advertising is the key.
Companies pay the website to display their ads. For each person who views or clicks the add, the website is paid a predetermined amount. It is usually a very small amount. For example, a website I worked with for a while was paid .02 cents (USD) per page-view of their add. Up-front this doesn't seem like much, but after we'd had over 20,000 people visit the sight in six months.. .02x20,000=400.00 USD. Not bad. Now look at Yahoo or Myspace with SO many more advertisements and SO many more people visiting. They easily get 10k people a DAY never the less page-views.
Not only that but Yahoo has a host of other ways to make money.

[Hush Lee]

It is generally advertising revenue. Facebook has masses of adverts (on the left hand side under the menu, on your Facebook front page (not the profile page) in the messages.

Because of the masses of traffic these sites generate they are able to arrange pay-per-impression (view) deals as well as click and completion adverts. Advertising revenue on Facebook is incredible.

The key is to have a huge amount of traffic visiting your sites each day.