I wanted to start building a site for selling traffic. I'd like to know what is more profitable between selling web traffic and social traffic like Facebook likes, Twitter followers, Google+, Youtube views...etc. Also I'd like to know what your preferences are on buying social media traffic and web traffic.
Please share your advice.
Cover all areas and focus 100% on useful and helpful content. You will need thousands of regular unique visitors before this becomes even remotely profitable for you. This website, for example, gets nearly 100,000 unique monthly visitors according to its own admission and sells ads for a mere $25 a month on the right column.
So you really need to aim high here. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm saying work HARD for it in order to compete. Also, there are many ways you can monetize traffic, and you should consider offering analytic data for your customers so they can visually see how well your traffic is working for them. This will keep them coming back, hopefully.
When you're ready, my specialty is building back-end web systems & web software. I'd be happy to help you build you site in a way that is easy to manage and scale-able for profitability. Enough of a sales pitch? Good, back on topic...
...Most of the web is funded by advertising. This means most of the web makes money by giving away free and useful content. This is really where your competition is - it is unlikely your website will offer something that is truly unique in terms of the web. So you're going to have to find ways to outwork your competitors or build a network of highly-focused niches. Alternatively, you could focus on geographic-specific topics. But whatever you do, you'll need to do a lot of it.
Do it all - all social platforms, and a website. You don't own your social platform profiles, but you do own your own website. So do both, but try to get the visitors to your main site. Lastly, you'll benefit yourself and other visitors by offering user contributions and making a platform in which others can contribute to your website. It will save you from doing all the content work, it will help you rank better in search engines, and it will demonstrate active engagement.
