(IDG) -- Lavonne Luquis thought it would be easier. Three years ago when she founded LatinoLink, "a space for Latinos on the Web," Luquis, a former print journalist, believed in a simple model: You found a niche audience, provided a solid service and funded your site through advertisers attracted to your quality content. It was the traditional print magazine model.

Soon after the site launched, Luquis realized something wasn't working. Content, no matter how good, was not enough to attract significant numbers. What's more, advertisers were wary of both the audiences and the medium.

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LatinoLink's experience was typical among sites geared toward minorities. Most, including NetNoir Online, Channel A and Women.com, began as content-driven sites – that is, online publications with familiar magazine-style articles. They thought that good content would produce good traffic, and good traffic would produce good advertising revenue. They were wrong.

But that's not the end of the story.

These founders discovered that Web publishing is different from traditional print media. Not only do Web audiences want different things, but their demographics are different. Web visitors, no matter what their cultural identity, are the affluent and educated audience of an advertisers' dreams. Making use of those demographics turns out to be the key to success.

But before a site can exploit an audience, it has to build one. Strategies varied. After members inundated Luquis with e-mail requests, LatinoLink added the hot new feature: chat. So did NetNoir Online and Women.com. Members didn't just want the ability to read what was going on in their community, they wanted to talk to one another.

Channel A took another route: e-commerce. When it first launched, Channel A, founded by former San Francisco Examiner reporter Steven Chin, was regarded as an Asian American site known for its community-oriented, quality content. But when the site didn't take off after a year and a half of operation, CEO Peggy Liu redefined the audience as "Asia watchers," non-Asians interested in Asia. One relaunch later, after Chin resigned, Channel A threw out its news content and laid off its writers and editors. It began trotting out a range of goods around the theme of "Modern Asian Living," including miniature Zen rock gardens, aromatherapy kits, iron lanterns and origami sets. Channel A, the only site to veer from a community-building model to an e-commerce model, folded at the end of July.

Meanwhile, many sites went after outside backing. The ultimate lifesaver was AOL. It picked up Hispanic Online and Jewish Community Online, back in the days when it paid a flat monthly fee for content. Hispanic Online still gets the majority of its income from AOL. The backing can mean that a site doesn't even need to venture out on the Web. "There's too much competition on the Web," says Marc Klein, the cofounder and publisher of Jewish Community Online, who has no plans to storm the Web. "We secured the Jewish.com name, but we'll never do anything as extensive as what we've done on AOL. We're very happy working with AOL. They pay us to run our site and our forum, and we're staying in business."

But AOL no longer makes deals like that. It now charges sites to be, in its parlance, tenants. (Women.com signed a deal to become a tenant of AOL's new women's channel.) Why pay? Because AOL's traffic is unbeatable. According to Luquis, LatinoLink (bought in July by Zap, Zapata's online arm) receives some 250,000 unique visitors a month, while AOL-sponsored Hispanic Online receives a total of 180,000 visitors. In some months, nearly half of that traffic can come from AOL. "America Online has done a lot for us," acknowledges Enrique Gonzalez, online editor and director of Hispanic Online. "They haven't gone out of their way for us, but we're our own little world there."

But living under the strong, sheltering wing of a big portal is not the only way for minority sites to survive. A helpful answer is to go back to the magazine model – with a difference. Just as print magazines generate income by selling subscriber lists, Web audiences offer considerable value. Net-Noir and Women.com have both created market research and consulting divisions in their companies to leverage the information they've compiled on their audiences.

The information is promising. Advertisers were initially wary of paying to reach an audience that, at least offline, they had been content to ignore. But the sites compiled studies to show that online and offline minority audiences were very different. Turns out that the Web attracts a strikingly similar demographic, regardless of ethnic or racial identity. From Women.com to NetNoir Online to LatinoLink, the audience is typically composed of college-educated, Internet-savvy professionals, aged 18 to 34, who earn an average income of $55,000 a year.

Hispanic Online's Gonzales remembers early on in the history of the site when a potential advertiser called in for demographic information. "I passed on the information," says Gonzales, "and a few hours later I got a call back asking me if my audience was really Hispanic, or if it was really [Anglos] interested in Hispanic culture."

Luquis concurs: "There were a lot of stereotypes in [advertisers'] minds. I think there were a lot of assumptions about how Latinos spent money, what Latinos would and would not buy, what they could afford." Even Ellen Pack reported that finding advertisers for an infant Women.com was met with skepticism. "We were told that women were a niche audience," says Pack.

But advertisers and marketing firms are sitting up and taking notice of the Web's ability to attract audiences that are, as Pack puts it, "solvent and savvy." Pack notes that financial services make up Women.com's biggest advertisers, with automobiles coming in second. NetNoir Online has also begun attracting the sort of advertisers and partnership deals that would make any site proud. In recent months, it has struck partnerships with Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab and E-Loan – all targeting financial services at NetNoir's audience.

The audiences are also shaping up to be valuable test markets. The Web is already an accommodating medium for gaining user feedback and tracking audience information. Aside from sharing demographic data compiled from their audiences as a whole and their usage patterns, sites are beginning to specialize their services, creating online surveys and focus groups that can give marketers access to a population size that would be much more difficult to obtain in the offline world. What's more, the information they need is delivered in days, if not hours. Pack estimates that a survey posted online can generate up to 20,000 answers in two weeks.

Speculation surrounds how much revenue these marketing divisions can generate. Pack believes that it will probably account for about 10 percent of Women.com's revenues, while Talk City, a site specializing in moderated chat, which has created a similar division, believes these marketing efforts can make up as much as 40 percent of Talk City's revenues. NetNoir has already been approached by the likes of the Democratic National Committee to help target a campaign to affluent African Americans, while Women.com has been tapped by General Motors.

LatinoLink reports that it too has been approached by a company specializing in market research to develop this branch. But Luquis isn't sure she wants to go down that path. Citing her journalistic roots, she isn't sure she completely likes the idea of using her site, whose primary value she still believes is its content, as a marketing tool. "We've considered it," says Luquis. "But I think it's a slippery slope. I'm not sure that it's a good idea to combine the two."