Fast Money

The idea behind it is to offer free information from your web site to pull in high volumes of traffic. Once you achieved that, advertisers would pay you to display their banners on your site. This is probably one of the oldest and most hyped ways to make money without money.

It worked really well until the end of 2000. It's how Yahoo became big. With the Internet bust, even Yahoo was forced to look to alternative revenue streams. Advertisers began to realize that, in most cases, banner advertising is just not cost effective.

Most people don't click banners. I know I don't.

Contextual advertising (like Google's AdSense program) is the big thing in online advertising. If done properly, it is far more effective than banner ads.