When the WWW was first born I tried putting up my content on a website and selling it surfers. Miserable failure. Wish I had got into selling the content to webmasters back then because this is a bit better.
But at the same time a magazine editor conned some investors into putting in a quarter of a million UK pounds for a website. The site was awesome, it had good content, lots of it and was designed very well.
When they launched it, they just put the URL into the search engines. Miserable failure for the investors, but I sold them some content.