Startups relying on Google Adsense

And I thought only bloggers were the ones relying on Adsense for revenues.

Forbes published an article about several startup companies that are growing and survived the business by solely relying on Google Adsense:

Case 1: Dogster.com and Catster.com is owned by Ted W.N. Rheingold who started it 2 years ago. Both sites are like Friendster, a social networking site– but with fur — and 211,000 member animals. His site grew and solely depended on Google Adsense for revenues. Now that his site is big enough, he has hiw own set of direct advertisers which hopefull could get him $1 Million in sales this year.

Case 2: Digg.com — founded by former TechTV personalities like Kevin Rose and Keith Harrison. I think everyone already knows about this social news and bookmarking site. And before they got some funding of $2.8 million from Greylock Partners, their operations depended on revenues from Google Adsense. (500,000 visitors and 5 Million pageviews a day)

Add to that list Wink, Browster, Become.com and Kaboodle able to survive by suction-cupping, like remora fish, to the back of Google’s AdSense program. Success stories or not, these people may have never gotten their 15 minutes of limelight had they not taken the risk and trusted Google to help them get thru it.

{ full story here. }

React to this article:

6 Comments

Miguel · 20 years ago

That’s right – I hope to see some more local players.

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 20 years ago

Startups do not need to pitch to “angels” to get their “ideas” realized. With low cost of infrastructure/bandwidth and instantmonetization thru Adsense, there is hope to those who have great ideas but no connections.

Adsense – the default Web 2.0 revenue model!

I’d like so see some local ones (not blogs).

Here’s more input from Kevin Burton of Tailrank, who joined Federated Media (John Battelle’s startup):

One of the things I like about FM and CPM ads in general is the fact that advertisers become part of the site experience. With Adsense I’m really just part of a larger network of sites that match on some proprietary Google algorithm.