[krelian]

I have a friend that owns a counter website (a site that provides free counters for webmasters.) The site has a nice traffic of 20,000 visitors per month out of which 2,000 register to get a counter code to put into their website.

Unfortunately, the site does not make any money. How can he make money out of such a site? He thought of offering additional services/products/software to webmasters, provide paid statistics service, etc but since the main attraction of this service is that it is free I have some doubts about this model, I am not sure enough people will agree to pay to make this profitable. I am not really familiar with this niche and was wondering what you guys thought about it.

[Cheesehead]

You might think of related sites that could make money. Create this type of site and then place prominent links to that site on your high-traffic counter site. For example, many webmasters do not realize that they can host unlimited sites on a single low-price hosting account.

I assume you have already tried contextual ads like AdSense?

[Jhangora]

If he really has software/service that provides value people would be happy to pay. He can adopt the freemium model. Basic services for free and the complete software/service for paid members.

[davidh]

That would not monetize the non-paying free user traffic though. The "host unlimited sites" webhost affiliate ads and Adsense are probably the best bets for the type of site he is running. Adsense ads for hosting and other webmaster-related services often pay several dollars per click.

[MichaelColey]

Consider things besides AdSense and affiliate marketing, too.

Assuming your friend has backlinks from all of the sites that use his counter, he should have excellent PageRank. He could always build a paid directory, sell links, or link to other sites of his to increase their PageRank.