Deals du jour
I had never heard of this website that provides you information about great deals and is now raking in $1M in revenues just with affiliate marketing fees. Founded by a young UNC-Chapel Hill student (like my younger brother), Brad Wilson dropped out to start dealsdujour.com according to this WSJ story (subscription required):
Mr. Wilson was still in college when he scored the flat-screen set for $360 by shrewdly combining a sale item with an e-coupon discount and a free shipping offer [on Amazon.com in 2001]. After friends harassed him to find similar bargains for them, he and his younger brother, Campbell, created a rudimentary Web page to list all the good online deals they found. Retailers began paying commissions on sales generated off the page. And thus with little more than a Compaq desktop computer, Mr. Wilson was in business as an "affiliate" marketer -- an online concierge who earns money by referring visitors to products or services sold elsewhere.
...Last year, dealsdujour.com took in $1 million in revenue after generating some $20 million in sales for 545 retailers such as Sharper Image Corp., Omaha Steaks, Best Buy Co., Avon Products Inc., and Origins, a seller of natural beauty and health products. A review of major discount- and deal-oriented sites by comScore found that dealsdujour.com was among the top 20 such sites in November, with 286,000 unique visitors.