Forbes magazine has this to say in an interesting article by Lisa LaMotta:

“Fifteen billion smackers: That’s the value Microsoft recently slapped on Facebook when the computer giant invested $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Mark Zuckerberg’s online social-networking site.

You could seethe with envy–or you could chase your own fortune on the Web.

Some online businesses require only a few hundred dollars in equipment, while others demand significant hardware and perhaps even a warehouse. Some might make you rich; others might just cover beer money. And all involve various levels of time, capital and technological skill.

In Pictures: Eight Ways To Make Money Online

“Some people have dreamed about owning their own business and have not followed through because of the investment in resources,” says Jim Griffith, head of eBay University, for those aiming to set up shop selling goods at the online auctioneer’s site. “The Internet allows people to at least try without making a large initial investment.”

Army veteran Brandi Ramos of Springfield, Ill., did it. As a single mom in need of extra income, she started her online retail career peddling “big and tall” men’s clothing on eBay.

Three years later, Ramos, 32, makes a good living working online out of her 600-square-foot basement packed with hanging displays and baker’s racks piled with tupperware containing underwear and belts. Ramos aims to offer quick service, answering all e-mails within four to six hours. She claims to net $25,000 on $100,000 sales a year, and even earns a few bucks per order on shipping.

If managing inventory seems too big a chore, play virtual landlord and charge other retailers monthly fees (or per-transaction fees) for the opportunity to market their products on your site. Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ) nabbed 28% of its revenues this way in 2006.

Craigslist is another take on this model: The 25-person company, worth a reported $2 billion, charges businesses to post help wanted ads in San Francisco, New York and L.A.; it also collects fees for apartment listings in New York City. Total page views per month: about 5 billion.

Then there’s every pajama-clad blogger’s dream: producing content supported by advertising dollars. Selling advertising is how thousands of established online media outlets pay their electric bills. They charge advertisers two ways: by the number of overall Web pages (called “impressions”) served up, and by the number of people who click on the ads.

Setting up a blog requires not much more than a basic publishing program, a server and software to track ad clicks. The hard part, though, is attracting enough eyeballs to make it worth someone’s while to pay to advertise on your site.

To have any prayer of attracting large advertisers, sites need to attract at least 500,000 unique visitors per month, says David Hauslaib, publisher of Jossip.com, a media and gossip blog that counts Coca Cola (nyse: KO - news - people ) and Sketchers among its advertisers. Sadly, even if you do generate enough traffic, the “click-through” rates on ads tend to be quite low–in the neighborhood of one half of 1%.

Subscription-based models are even harder to crack. Unless your site fulfills an urgent need (for tangible investment ideas, a potential mate, etc.), users aren’t likely to pay for the content.

One way to garner subscription revenue is to run a virtual marketplace. These sites collect by allowing buyers and sellers easy access to each other. Many of these marketplaces flamed out in the dot-com bust, but some persist. Mfg.com, for instance, matches equipment manufacturers with smaller component suppliers. Dating sites like Match.com charge subscription fees for access to their members. And H2Bid.com links municipalities with wastewater-equipment vendors.

As with tangible real estate, you can buy virtual plots (URL addresses), flip them and make a buck. GoDaddy.com sells unused domain names for under $10 dollars apiece. To attract buyers, run tests to determine how often certain key words are searched so that you can demonstrate the likelihood that your URL will show up in a Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) or Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) search. One tip: The best domain names are short, sweet, specific and easy to remember. (For more on this model, check out “Meet Noah Of The Internet” and “The Most Expensive Web Addresses.”)

As Internet usage grows, so too will the sophistication of online business models. Take 3-year-old Yoonew.com, which sells futures contracts on sports tickets.

Fans buy the right to take delivery of tickets if their teams make it to a coveted playoff game, perhaps months away. Given the uncertainty of the bet, those contracts sell for a fraction of the future market value of the underlying tickets. If your team makes it to the big game, you’ve locked in a cheap seat; if it falls short, you lose that insurance premium.

Yoonew makes money when the revenue it collects from selling all those contracts exceeds the cost of delivering a small number of very expensive tickets on game days. The danger: If ticket prices spike, or there are no seats available, the company could suffer a loss or alienate its customers.

Sure, you can make money online. But no one said it was easy.”

My take on this article is that there are a ton of good ideas out there and all you really need is to work hard at it…no quick and easy ways.

However, work smarter, not harder.

As reported in the  Wall Street Journal, Nielsen has partnered with Digimarc to create something called the Digital Media Manager. This service offers media companies the ability to track copyrighted video content online.

Nielsen have expertise on analyzing data, and they’ve already digitized about 95% of US TV programming for the purpose of their ratings service. Time will tell what Nielsen and Digimarc have in stock.

Reports of Facebook’s demise are greatly exaggerated. So suggests Mashable.com in this post.

This poll suggests however that many have not even heard of Facebook Beacon, as is indicated in the image below:

Most people still login primarily to check messages, pokes, and wall posts, and then get on with their day, the majority of which isn’t spent reading RSS feeds.

Compete.com shows a healthy growth in Facebook traffic of 20%:

Although Beacon has its teething problems, nothing indicates that Facebook is going to be going away any time soon.

If only Frodo had his Apple iPhone handy he could have taken the long and windy road through Middle Earth in record time - it’s been mapped by Google. For its “Lord of the Rings Online” game, developer and publisher Turbine, Inc. licensed the Google Maps API to map out world of “Lord of the Rings.” And like all things Google, it’s in beta! “We will keep it in beta as long as we’re adding features,” said Jim Drewry, director of marketing at Turbine. The map and wiki Turbine offers to its users is part of a retention-based marketing strategy.

And that whole hour long hobbit reunion saga at the end of episode 3 could have been happily cut out, Peter Jackson…

Microsoft reports that “Halo 3″ reached $300 million in sales in its first seven days at retail. On the Web there was a 150 percent increase in searches for the term “halo 3″ in the four weeks ending September 29, 2007, according to Hitwise. People primarily searched for the game’s skulls, release date (September 25), cheats, weapons, and reviews.

“Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock” available since October and a nifty Christmas present is really filled with brands keen to take centre stage. Brands present in the game? Gibson, Guitar Center, Audio-Technica, Crate, Ernie Ball, Krank, Line 6, Mackie, and Zildjian on the instrument and equipment side.

After each performance, players can view their reviews in Alternative Press, Decibel, Guitar Player, Kerrang, and Paste magazines.

Branding from Pontiac and Axe, among other brands, also appear in the game. You can also upgrade your standard guitar controller to the Guibson Guitar Les Paul model for about $10 more.

Google has announced the availability of its AdSense Video Units in the U.K. and Ireland, following the U.S. launch in October.

As reported by ClickZ News last month, the units allow publishers to display YouTube content within an embedded player on their site. Content-relevant text overlay ads are then displayed within the lower portion of the unit, with ads rotated every 20 seconds. Ads are sold on a CPM or cost-per-click basis.

Publishers can choose categories of video to target their site, specify individual YouTube partners, or have video units automatically target their site with relevant video. In theory this will allow U.K. sites to display U.K.-only content if required or desired. Other than that, the units themselves are identical to their U.S. equivalents. In a press release, David Thacker, group product manager for Google stated the program will “create a new revenue opportunity for publishers and content owners, and help advertisers reach their target audiences in new and innovative ways.”

Facebook is attempting to ease privacy concerns about its Beacon consumer data sharing initiative, but many of its own partners are backing off.

Overstock.com was among the first of Facebook’s early partners to retreat, but as the Times’ Bits blog reports, Coca Cola has also backed out for the moment. Most likely both companies will return to Beacon after assessing the new changes, which require users to explicitly approve the broadcast of off-Facebook behavioral and purchase data to their social networks.

If you happen to be a Facebook partner, whether you’re skittish about Beacon will depend a lot on your product or service.

Google is adding oomph to local business ad listings with a new user interface design called AdWords Local PlusBox.

This innovation will give ads that are located above organic search results the ability to expand and display maps, addresses, phone numbers and driving directions to the business.

You won’t be charged extra for the display features, but Google will continue to charge customers when a user clicks on a link to their landing page.

“Say-hey-hey is the place to Date or Hook-up just by being You. It’s All Video. All Free. All Real”.

The brainchild of Alex Gurevich and Soudy Khan, SayHeyHey lets singles record and share videos of themselves for free.

Approximately 500 videos are running so far and, coming soon, singles with some extra cash will be able to purchase more prominent placement of their videos on the site.