Last week I signed up for a cool service called GameTap. Its a cool service that only costs $9 a month but lets you play any game from their library of over 500 PC & video games on demand. If you enjoy classic games like I do, its a bargain. You don’t have to hunt down fixes to get the games to work on the latest version of windows; just click, download, and play.

I’ve stayed far away from gaming for over a year now, so unfortunately this has killed my productivity a little bit over the past few days. So what does this have to do with website publishing?

Gametap is a great example of an online business that repackages old content. Because it is old the original owners of these games aren’t making a lot of money from it, so the company can get the rights to use it at bargain prices.

I have used the same technique with great success. If you have content created for you, it is either expensive or cheap and low quality. If you can find existing high quality content you can often get it for cheaper than the custom low quality stuff!

This re-package/re-use technique can extend to your own content. Tim Carter is a home repair newspaper columnist. He republished hundreds of his old articles on AskTheBuilder.com and now makes more than $1400 a day. (Follow that link if you are skeptical, that comes from an official Google Adsense case study)

The internet is all about easy access to content. If there is something that is difficult to find in your niche, be it old books, articles, games, gaming rules, whatever, track down the copyright owner and see if you can purchase their content — chances are they are not making a lot (if any) money from it right now.