Software Business Idea: Help people monetize their wireless routers

by phil on Tuesday Dec 2, 2008 11:11 PM
ideas for business

I know this has already been at least imagined a bunch of times, and maybe implemented crudely, but I wonder if I could open my wireless router, but then insert codes into all web traffic so that I get a percentage of ad revenue from people's Google Searches. Better yet, I wonder if I can get a percentage revenue from all iTunes, Amazon purchases, etc. There are maybe 1,000 to 10,000 services I could sign up for with affiliate codes, such that I could potentially make a decent chunk of change from people using my Wi-Fi. If I was getting a cut from a single or double-digit % of my neighbor's e-Commerce transactions, then that could make it worth it to open up my wireless router for free.

Obviously, there's some legal questions with that. Some affiliate providers may not like the idea, some don't care. But you, as a new company, could manage those relationships and provide a one-click solution for anybody with a wireless router to make some extra change from it.

This occurred to me when I thought about how Firefox made $66 million from skimming off Google Ad Revenue from searches on the default home page. And then I remembered logging into free wireless at the grocery store. I could imagine them, instead of a "please click here to begin surfing," it just shows a generic Google home page with embedded affiliate codes.