The Best Work From Home Jobs Ever

AdSense is an ad serving application run by Google Inc. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image, and more recently, video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta tested a cost-per-action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick offering (also owned by Google).What happened to the pay-per-action beta?

Break.com (formerly Big-boys.com) is a humor website founded in 1998 that features comedy videos, flash games, and pictures among other material. The chief executive officer of Break is Keith Richman. The web site's target audience is men 18-35.

CafePress is an online retailer of stock and user-customized on demand products. CafePress.com is headquartered in San Mateo, California, USA and its production facility is located in Louisville, Kentucky.

ChaCha is a mobile question answering service which uses a technique known as the human search engine. ChaCha was created by Scott A. Jones and Brad Bostic. The company is based in Carmel, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis.

Commission Junction is an online advertising company owned by ValueClick. It is specifically in the affiliate marketing industry.

Commission Junction is the largest affiliate network in North America, powering 53% of the top 500 web retailers affiliate marketing programsNew Network Flavors , May/June 2006 Issue: Page 32, Revenue MagazineAffStat 2007 1. CJ/BeFree, 2. DirectTrack, 3. ShareASale, 4. Linkshare, 5. LinkConnector and vTarget and operates worldwide. Along with being the world's largest Affiliate Network, Commission Junction also promotes their Search Marketing services and their media services. Their corporate headquarters is located in Santa Barbara, California with other offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Westborough and Westlake. Commission Junction has also offices in the UK, Germany, France, Sweden and Spain.

Commission Junction has over 1,500 customers including Overstock.com, Buy.com, Home Depot, Circuit City, and Yahoo!.

Convergys Corporation () is a multi-national corporation that provides relationship management solutions, outsourced customer and HR management solutions, consulting and professional services, billing services, and multichannel self-care technology solutions to its clients. Most of its clients are companies in the telecommunications, financial services, technology, government, and employee care markets.

eBay Inc. is an American Internet company that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide.

The majority of the sales take place through a set-time auction format, but subsequent methods include a substantial segment of listings in the "Buy It Now" category.

In addition to its original U.S. website, eBay has established localized websites in thirty other countries. eBay Inc. also owns PayPal, StubHub, Kijiji, and other businesses.

eHow is an online knowledge resource with more than 337,000 articles and videos offering step-by-step instructions on "how to do just about everything". eHow content is created by both professional experts and amateur members and covers a wide variety of topics organized into a hierarchy of categories.

Through a proprietary social networking platform and user-generated content tools, eHow maintains an online community of users who publish how-tos, images and video clips and receive a percentage of profits earned from traffic and advertising. eHow members can network and collaborate by building a personalized profile, creating friend lists, commenting on articles and interacting in an online forum.

Etsy is a website that provides the general public with a way to buy and sell handmade items as well as vintage items and craft supplies. Handmade items cover a wide range including art, photography, clothing, jewelry, edibles, bath & beauty products, and toys. The site follows in the tradition of open craft fairs, giving sellers personal storefronts where they list their goods for a fee.

It has been compared to "a crafty cross between Amazon and eBay", and to "your grandma's basement".

Fotolia is a microstock photography agency that is based in New York, New York. It was started by Oleg Tscheltzoff, Patrick Chassany, Thibaud Elziere *Andy Goetze, Interview With Fotolia´s CEO Thibaud Elziere, StockPhotoTalk.com, November 28, 2005, accessed April 29, 2007 in November 2005. The company also has offices in Seattle, Washington and Paris, France.

Fotolia provides means for worldwide distribution of photographs, through PayPal (in the countries that use it), and Moneybookers (another internet payment system offered in more countries than Paypal). Some photographs are offered for free; those that are sold are priced from $1 to as high as $2,000.

As of October 2008, Fotolia had more than 800,000 members who had uploaded more than 4.2 million photographs and graphic illustrations.

Guru.com is a freelance marketplace.Guru.com puts freelancers to work - PC World It allows companies to find freelance workers for commissioned work. Founded in 1998 in Pittsburgh as eMoonlighter.com and still headquartered there, it is one of the tech firms to survive the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. eMoonlighter.com was actually a low budget company, running on only $400,000,Lessons for a guru: Small online tech outsourcing firm survives by watching pennies, buys giant rival Guru.com - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and yet becoming extremely profitable due to efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Guru Inc. was founded in 1999 in San Francisco, and the company was acquired in December 2002 by Unicru, a human resources software company based in Portland, Oregon. Guru's technology and staff remained with Unicru, focused on software to help large employers assess and hire job applicants. Unicru sold the Guru.com domain name and logo to eMoonlighter.com, and eMoonlighter was renamed Guru.com.

Guru.com directly connects businesses and employees in 160 different fields. The company remains profitable despite offering some of their basic services for free.

Some customers (freelancers) are dissatisfied with Guru.com's strong employer bias. "I make sure that my subscribers know that they are not my customer -- the employer is," said Inder Guglani, and Guru.com site policies reflect Mr. Guglani's philosophy.

Helium.com, Inc. is a website where active writers are paid for contributing articles, and visitors can read these articles for free. User generated content in a given title is rated up or down by other writers in a form of peer review system. As with social news sites like Digg or Reddit, user ratings determine the rank of an article. In this case, however, the ones who rate are the writers, and multiple answers/articles exist and compete in most topics. In turn, high-rated articles receive more page views and earn more money for writers. According to Alexa's website global traffic rankings, Helium.com's rank has increased significantly in the last six months and is now consistently better than 3000 as of March 2009. The site's number of users has grown from over 5,000 in October 2006 to 100,000 in February 2008.

HubPages is a website designed around sharing advertising revenue for high-quality, user-generated content. The interface resembles predecessors like Squidoo, allowing members to create individual pages on narrow topics of general interest. HubPages differs from other blog networking sites by using the Google AdSense API to manage revenue-sharing with writers.

iOffer is a San Francisco-based online trading community that was launched on May 1, 2002 by Steven Nerayoff.

As of February 2008, it had nearly one million total users, including approximately 75,000 sellers.

iOffer deviates from the online auction business model and instead adopts the "negotiated commerce model", characteristic of garage sales and flea markets,

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operating on the basis of negotiation between buyers and sellers rather than bidding. When a negotiation concludes successfully (i.e. a transaction occurs), iOffer charges a "final value fee" based on a sliding scale. The website advertises this distinction, claiming: "This is not an auction. It's better!"

iOffer permits free listing of items for sale, charging fees only for premium listing services (such as bolding, highlighting, and listing on the home page). Sellers can post an asking price or request offers; buyers, in turn, can purchase an item at its asking price or make an offer. Users can also post "want ads" at no charge and barter.

All transactions are recorded and can be viewed by other users.

iOffer competes with other similar negotiated e-commerce websites, as well as online auction sites such as eBay.

According to Greg Holden, author of multiple books about eBay, from the perspective of sellers iOffer is both a "complement"

and "good alternative" to eBay. Through iOffer's software program Mr. Grabber, sellers can relist items from sites such as eBay, and Overstock.com onto iOffer en masse, as well as import eBay feedback ratings.

Unlike sites such as eBay, however, iOffer provides little in the way of buyer protection from fraudulent and other problem transactions. Buyer beware.

iStockphoto is an online, royalty free, international microstock photography provider operating with the micropayment business model. Images cost between 1 and 20 credits, depending on size (with credits ranging from $.95 to $1.50 USD Buy Pay-as-you-go Credit Packages - Company pricing page each). General consensus attributes the pioneering of the microstock photography industry to iStockphoto, which claims to be "internet's original member-generated image and design community."

The online photo library contains (as of January 2009) over 4 million images (up from 760,000 in April, 2006) contributed by over 50,000 photographers at the rate of 27,000+ images per weekistockphoto.com - stats released in forums. iStockphoto.com is currently (25 March 2009) ranked 561 on Alexaalexa.com - Alexa ranking.

LinkShare Corporation provides ecommerce businesses with a range of online marketing services including Search Marketing (SEM), Lead Generation and Affiliate Marketing.

LinkShare boasts that it has created the largest network of affiliate partners of any program provider -- over 10 million partnerships -- in addition to becoming the first affiliate network provider to achieve sustained profitability. LinkShare also lays claim to being a pioneer in online affiliate marketing. The LinkShare network is touted by the company as the largest pay for performance affiliate marketing network on the Internet Derek Vaughan (July 12, 2005),Make Money From Your Content Site, Sitepoint.com, retrieved August 12, 2007.

LinkShare clients are Fortune 500 and prominent companies doing business online, and include J.C. Penney, 1-800-Flowers.com, American Express, Avon Products and many others.

Lulu (Lulu Enterprises,Inc., and Lulu Press,Inc.? collectively, "Lulu"www lulu com/about/member_agreement.php) is a company offering diverse publishing and printing services with headquarters at Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. The company is international with staff in 12 countries, and offices in Raleigh, London, Toronto and Bangalore.http://lulupresscenter.com/uploads/assets/Press_Kit_908.pdf In addition to printing and publishing services it also offers online-order fulfillment. The brand name is derived from the concept of a lulu as an old-fashioned term for a remarkable person, object, or idea.

The company's CEO is Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Authors who publish/print materials and similar works through Lulu retain the copyrights to such materials and similar works.

Optional services offered by the company include ISBN assignment, and distribution of books to retailers requesting specific titles (returns are not accepted, which limits distribution to physical bookstores). Electronic distribution is also available.

Lulu Enterprises was founded in early 2002. OpenMind Publishing, founded by Bradley Schultz and Paul Elliot, merged its publishing company and staff with Lulu in the latter part of 2002. OpenMind Publishing was a publisher of customized texts for college professors.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the suite of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. Requesters, the human beings that write these programs, are able to pose tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk's Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the more limited Mturk Requester site.

Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker's reputation. Currently, a Requester has to have a U.S. address, but Workers can be anywhere in the world. Payments for completing tasks can be redeemed on Amazon.com via gift certificate or be later transferred to a Worker's U.S. bank account. Requesters, which are typically corporations, pay 10 percent over the price of successfully completed HITs (or more for extremely cheap HITs) to Amazon.

oDesk is a company with a global job marketplace and a series of tools targeted at businesses that intend to hire and manage remote workers. Based in Menlo Park, CA, oDesk was founded by Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis. The name is a short version of "no desk" in reference to the company's intent to enable anyone to work anywhere, anytime.

oDesk has raised three rounds of financing. The first was by Globespan Capital and Sigma Partners. The second round was raised in September 2006, led by Benchmark Capital and included the previous two investors.

The third round was raised in May 2008, led by DAG Ventures and included the previous three investors. The venture investors on oDesk's board include Greg Gretsch, Venky Ganesan, and Kevin Harvey.

OrganizedWisdom.com is a human-powered search service for health (or human search engine) launched in alpha test in October 2006 by Steven H. Krein and Unity Stoakes. As of July 2008, the project is in beta test. It differentiates itself from algorithmic search engines like Google, as well as other directory sites like DMOZ and Yahoo by tracking and building hand-crafted result sets for many of the currently popular health search terms.

PayPerPost (PPP) is a website which helps content creators such as bloggers find advertisers willing to sponsor specific content. The advertisers create opportunities ("opps") that describe the content they are looking for (e.g. feedback, reviews, buzz, creative, video). The bloggers (sometimes referred to as "Posties") then choose opportunities in their area of interest.Interview with PayPerPost VC Dan Rua

Once the blogger has written a blog post or posted a video that matches the requirements, PPP then reviews the post against its requirements (e.g. topic, tone, length) and PPP terms of service (e.g. disclosure required, no adult content), and handles payment.

In April 2007, PPP introduced a segmentation system whereby advertisers can limit which bloggers qualify for their opportunity. The system uses criteria such as Google Page Rank, Alexa rank, blogger quality rank, RealRank and blog categories. They can also exclude blogs on certain domains.

PayPerPost sparked controversy in its first year, with critics saying that sponsored blogging was unethical.LA Times - March 9, 2007 - Blogging for dollars raises questions of online ethics It has received sustained criticism from technology blogger Michael Arringtonpayperpost - TechCrunch and sustained support from technology blogger Andy Beardpayperpost | Andy Beard - Niche Marketing. Some supporters said that sponsored blogging helps "blue-collar bloggers"A-List Types Refuse To Acknowledge Blogging's Blue Collar Class, and PayPerPost members asserts that there is room for all views in the blogosphereWhen Knights of the Realm Climb on Their High Horses.

PayPerPost is a business unit of IZEA, founded by Ted Murphy, who had also founded the interactive agency MindComet and the BlogStar Network, designed to connect advertisers with bloggers in a manual, non-marketplace fashion. "BlogStar Network" was later absorbed by PayPerPost.

Revver is a video sharing website that hosts user-generated content. Revver attaches advertising to user-submitted video clips and shares all ad revenue 50/50 with the creators (40/40/20 if the video is hosted by a third party). Videos can be displayed, downloaded and shared across the web in either Apple QuickTime or FLV format. In addition, Revver is a Video Publishing Platform that can enable any third-party to build their own "Revverized" site. The site is actually built on top of Revver's own API, and third-parties can build identical functionality into their own sites. Revver allows developers to create a complete white label of the Revver platform.

ShareASale is an affiliate marketing network based in Chicago, IL USA. ShareASale services two customer sets in affiliate marketing: the affiliate, and the merchant.

Affiliates use ShareASale to find products to promote, and earn commission for referrals on those products. Affiliates use their own website, blogs, PPC campaigns, SEO campaigns, RSS and email, as well as a number of other means.

Merchants use ShareASale to implement, track, and manage their affiliate program.

Shutterstock is a microstock photography website which maintains a library of royalty-free stock images available by subscription. Visitors can browse the entire image library for free, and can license and download images online through a variety of subscription offers.

Shutterstock adds to its library each day as photographers and illustrators from around the world submit their work. The new photos, vectors, and illustrations undergo a selection process based on quality, aesthetics, artistry, and originality before the accepted images are added to the library.

As of September 2009, Shutterstock had more than 8 Million royalty-free images available to subscribers, taken by more than 189,000 photographers, illustrators, and videographers.Shutterstock.com - Stats released on image website

On September 23, 2009, Shutterstock announced that it had purchased rival site Bigstockphoto, effectively entering the credit-based stock image marketplace. Stephen Shankland "Shutterstock Buys Rival, Shifts Photo Sales Strategy", CNET, September 23, 2009

Squidoo is a community website that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest. Squidoo is in the top 500 most visited sites in the world, and in the top 300 most viewed in the United States.Squidoo.com traffic details Alexa.com. Squidoo grew 91% in 2008, and had 900,000 handbuilt lenses as of February 1st, 2009.

Voxant is a new media company based in Herndon, Virginia in the United States. Voxant is a privately held company which was founded in 2004.

In April 2006, Voxant launched its new media network, syndicating fully-licensed news and information content to Web publishers and bloggers. Today over 35,000 Web publishers and bloggers are members of the network. Content distributed by Voxant includes news clips, stories, and images from about 250 sources including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS News, MTV News, Reuters, The Associated Press, Agence France Presse and New York Financial Press.

The Yahoo! Publisher Network (abbreviated YPN) is a beta network launched on August 2, 2005 by Yahoo!. As the service is currently in Beta, it is currently only accepting US-Based publishers; it is believed that Yahoo! will expand this when the program comes out of Beta. YPN provides cost per click contextual advertising as well as various tools and services to assist publishers in building and improving their websites.

In May 2006, YPN caused some controversy by shutting down accounts used for MySpace layout sites. The reason given was the quality of traffic was very poor.

Also in May 2006, the Yahoo! Publisher Network's blog posted an updated version of their requirements from publishers.http://ypnblog.com/blog/2006/05/23/just-so-you-know/ YPN have now explicitly stated visitors must recognize advertisements as advertisements, and images/media may not be placed to induce accidental clicks.

Zazzle is an online retailer that allows users to upload images and create their own merchandise (clothing, posters, etc), or buy merchandise created by other users, similar to CafePress.com or Propell.com, as well as use images from participating companies such as The Walt Disney Company. Users are allowed to open their own shop for free and set the profit they wish to make on each item.

Zazzle was founded in 1999 by Robert Beaver, and his sons Bobby and Jeff Beaver. In 2005, Google investors John Doerr and Ram Shriram invested US$16 million into the business. The site was recognized by TechCrunch as 2007's "best business model" in its first annual "Crunchies" awards,2007 Crunchies: The Winners. and has been noted by industry experts, such as B. Joseph Pine, for its easy-to-use technology.

Zazzle.com offers Digital printing, and embroidered decoration on their retail apparel iteams, as well as other personalization techniques and items.