There are lots of ways to make money off the internet*, but some of them are really hard. Here’s one (somewhat) easy way I can think of: come up with something that

• People google but have a hard time finding, and
• Is available on the internet already in some ungoogleable format.

That’s the hard part. Then all you have to do is write a script to convert that information into a more Google-friendly format, post it to a site, and plaster ads all over it. Preferably, this would be information that is changing all the time, so that you can create several pages of content, each with its own ads. Once you’ve written the script, this will all run on its own as often as it needs to be updated.

*One way is to create a blog post entitled “how to make money off the internet.”

The best example of this I’ve found is Crossword Heaven. If you google a crossword clue, Crossword Heaven’s site shows up early in the search results. It doesn’t show you the answer right away, it makes you click for it. And when you do click, you get the answer and a bunch of ads. It’s brilliant. I don’t think that site requires any manual intervention apart from the initial setup — every day (I assume) the site runs a script to download all the information about the day’s crosswords, adds them to a database, creates new pages based on the new clues, and voila. People are constantly googling crossword clues, so it makes sense to do that.

So! What other areas are open for this kind of scheme?