How do I make money from Internet

Asking "How do I make money on the Internet?" is like asking "How do I make money on the telephone?" The Internet is a communications device; use it to communicate with people and maybe you'll make some money. Ignore it and you'll be about as prosperous as a company that doesn't answer its phone.
An example of a good commercial site is www.fedex.com. They took an internal database containing information that customers need (i.e., "the location of package #2389156") and made it available to everyone on the Web. You can nose around for their press releases if you like, but basically the entire site is functional. Does the site sell anything? Not really.
Examples of awful Web sites are too numerous to list, but prime candidates include
www.ford.com. Note that here is a company used to cramming information down consumers' throats whether they like it or not. You've basically got the on-line equivalent of advertisements and product brochures. Can you find out which dealer in your area has the highest satisfaction rating? Can you fill out a form to pick the options for a car, seeing which options preclude what and then getting the invoice and retail prices? Will it query the Ford database to find out which dealers in your area recently got shipped cars similar to what you want? No, no, no, no.
[In fairness to Ford, it should be pointed out that the GM site, which came out about six months later, is even worse. EDS built it, presumably for zillions of dollars.]
www.kodak.com. Here is a company whose ad agency makes some of the nicest consumer campaigns in the world. Their Web site looks like randomly scattered product brochures. Notice how the whole focus is company-centric instead of consumer-centric. Yet Kodak has hundreds of in-house publications that contain information that would help photographers. None of these have been placed on the Web. As of March 4, 1996, McDonald's was still waiting for this Internet thing to catch on and consequently didn't have a Web site. However, I'm sure that after they've spent their $millions, their site won't be half as good or 1/10th as trafficked as McSpotlight.
The Internet is a 26 year-old community. Businesses with billions of dollars that discover the Net and decide "let's see if we can make a quick buck off this Net thing" are probably not going to endear themselves to anyone. The people who will prosper are those that figure out how to provide a useful service that people in the community value.
Do something that is isn't done well in traditional mediaWhy does Travels with Samantha get 1/8th the traffic of Pathfinder and 1/3 the traffic of HotWired? Pathfinder is maintained by hundreds of full-time people; HotWired by nearly a hundred; Samantha took me two weeks to Webify. My theory is that Travels with Samantha, an illustrated travelogue, does something that is very poorly done in traditional media. Magazines print lots of nice pictures but don't want to print long text. Book publishers printing travelogues print long text but don't want to pay for color separations and printing for a lot of pictures. Pathfinder, by contrast, is mostly news. News is something that is done very well by TV, radio, news magazines (including Time-Warner's own), and newspapers.