What type of website will be most profitable? (Commercial vs. Traffic)

[Au Dang]

Hello everyone,
I've been lurking these forums for a little bit now and have decided to take the next step. So far I've come up with a few ideas for e-commerce muses, only to see that they've been done by someone else. After drawing a blank on thinking of any new product muses, my friend and I thought of an idea for a website that could possibly generate a large amount of traffic, but not sell anything directly. We were wondering if it would be better to pursue this route, as we do not have any current ideas for selling something specifically, or if we should brainstorm harder until we find a good product muse idea. Thank you for your time.

PS: We're currently on the stage of thinking up names for the site because we feel like the experience of developing a site would be good for us anyways. If you would like more information, please shoot me a PM.

[jazzdrive3]

Don't be scared if other people have done it, or are doing it. That means it's probably making money.

One of the first things to recognize in entrepreneurship is that we're not as clever as tend to think we are. Someone else has always though of it before hand and probably implemented it.

The key is to focus on execution of the idea, because that's where differences are made.

As for traffic, it depends on the niche, whether you should pursue it or not. Visit similar websites within the niche or closely related niches and see if people spend money. If the site has paid advertising for while, that means someone is making money from the traffic.

[jetpacklife]

I have been very successful with the free, ad based, large traffic sites. ( I've made multiple sites that have gotten over 1M page views a day)

Success with large traffic sites are all about keep costs down. Typical ad rates are at about $1 per 1000 page views. A large site is going to need it's own server, if not more. I've seen a few large sites go down because the owners start drowning in operational costs. You're lucky though in that these costs have been trending down for many years, and servers and bandwidth are downright cheap now.