Ask HN: What are the good old ideas that still make money on the web?
Not good ideas but lucrative: porn, pills, casinos, rebelling fraud, diet scams, Make Money Online, etc etc.<p>Oldies which add value and continue to make money: affiliates (travel, mortgage, credit cards, insurance, etc continue to print money, though barriers to entry are much higher than they once were).  Lead gen remains a multibillion dollar industry.<p>There are <i>many</i> companies with six/seven/eight figure sales of unsexy software, not all of which is SaaS on a monthly basis yet.  (Though it probably should be :) ). Time tracking, invoicing, collaboration, and all the other usual suspects for freelancers each support more than a dozen companies.  Business productivity/communication/collaboration tools.  There are thousand niche things you'd never think of if you didn't love a vertical to death.  (e.g. Solving the problems of multi property landlords... with software.  There's one guy whose supports four families with a <i>very</i> specialized spreadsheet wrapped in a Swing app.)<p>Traditional web page hosting continues to make money.  (Not everyone loves VPSes or AWS.  Your local bakery has to get on the net somehow...) There are ecosystems around e.g. wordpress themes and shopping carts for getting the Fortune Five million on the Internet.  These support marketplace sites, affiliates, etc etc.<p>Niche publishing plus ads remains lucrative in many sectors.  If you dominate the Internet for Christmas cookie recipes, that is about equivalent to a full-time job as a cookbook author.  Every similarly sized field of human endeavor makes someone the 68% that Google isn't taking.<p>E-commerce still exists.  Pick something you can buy: fishing rods, for example.  Someone makes a living selling fishing rods online, I'll guarantee you.