STURGEON PRODUCTIONS, LLC (1996 - Current)
I started creating web sites when I was 14 years old . This was in 1996, before high speed Internet and even before Google existed. I originally made web sites as a hobby until they started getting a lot of visits and I discovered that I could make money by accepting advertising. I quickly turned my hobby into a successful online business that I still run today.
My web sites currently receive 11,000 unique visitors every day from people all over the world. I’ve made web sites about my favorite music artists, athletes and fashion designers, a jokes web site, a night life web site, a health/fitness web site, and several chat rooms and discussion forums.
Almost all of my company's income comes from advertising revenue on my web sites. All of the ad space on my web sites is sold by Burst Media, an advertising firm that represents specialy-content web sites to advertisers such as Monster.com, Quicken, Circuit City, MTV, Verizon, The Dish Network, Ask Jeeves, and many others. I'm primarily paid by the impression. (Usually around $1-$3 CPM) Any unsold ad space defaults to Google or Yahoo's publisher networks, which show ads based on the specific web page's content and pays me when a visitor clicks on an ad. I'm also a member of several affiliate programs, including Amazon, Yahoo Music, and All Posters, where I am paid a percent of every order made by a customer who was referred by my web site.
My web sites have received a lot of publicity in local media. In 1999, I created discussion forums for every high school in Eastern Connecticut. Students were free to access the site and post just about whatever they wanted. As you could imagine, this stirred up quite a bit of controversy. Some students were suspended from school for things they posted on my forums and many parents and school officials were against the web site. I e-mailed a press release to a local newspaper about the story and soon I found myself on the front page of the paper. Later, that same paper even ran an entire section entitled "World Wide Gossip" which described the controversy behind my discussion forums. I appeared in The New London Day, The Norwich Bulletin, The Providence Journal, and was interviewed about my web sites on a local cable access show.
I have also created several professional web sites for small businesses after word was spread by friends and family members about my web design skills. I offered web page design at very low prices and even hosted the web sites for free so I could build up my clientele.
