Making money via advertising while losing money on the deal…
By Rajesh Setty on Wed 04 Jul 2007, 12:54 AM – 1 Comment
I am flying to Washington DC tomorrow to attend (and speak at) the TANA 2007 conference. While I was booking my car rental at CheapTickets.com (Yes, I work for a startup) I saw an ad for HotWire.com. Here is the image
Of course, the price at HotWire was cheaper than CheapTickets.com and I had no choice (again, I work for a startup) but to book my ticket with Hotwire.com.
I really don’t get it. Unless CheapTickets.com and HotWire.com are owned by the same company, it does not make sense for CheapTickets.com to send me to a competitor site. Yes, they made money through advertising but lost money on the deal 
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Posted in the Business Models, Main Page category.
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Anonymous on July 4th, 2007
They didn’t lose anything. You already knew you were going to go with the rock-bottom price, which CheapTickets.com, you can be sure, knew they didn’t have. There was no potential for income in your case. They generated income despite not having a chance to make a sale. You can’t lose money until you have it in hand. Anything prior to that is only potential money, which is to say no money at all.