Can you make money on the internet?  The short, simple answer is yes.  Website owners that go through large internet ad based corporations like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc can indeed make money.  These companies will pay you every time someone clicks on an advertisement that is located on your website.  The payout is very small, you probably will barely be able to buy a pack of gum a day or even a week with the amount of profit you make. However, you need to realize the broad spectrum there is with online advertising.

Simple Easy Approach

Thesimple easy approach to making money on the internet is for you to sign up for an advertising account through one of the major search engines.  Once you have done that, place those advertisements on your website. The amount of traffic you get to your website will usually directly coorespond to how much you will make.  Obviously not every visitor to your site will click on your advertisements, but usually the advertisement content is customized to meet that specific web page the user is surfing.  

Example: If a user goes to your website and your website is all about fish, then there most likely will be an advertisement about fish there.  The ads usually will change or rotate through a few different ads that are available, however if your website or web page is about some totally random topic, there may not even be a large pool of advertisers to pull from.

Let me try to explain it another way, there has to be someone on the other side of the internet, some individual, some company that is trying to get more exposure.  They pay a search engine to advertise.  The search engines then place their advertisements on RELEVANT websites that have to do with the same thing as their business.  Now this can be good or bad for you as the advertising gateway, because lets say you run a web design business and then you place some ads on your site through one of the large search engines.  You may very well be getting local, regional ads on your website about other web development companies.  Is this good?  Probably not, because now you are advertising those other companies on your website for free, if the user doesn't click, yet that other company still got their name out there, ON YOUR WEBSITE.

Obviously, the people that usually sign up for Google Adsense or some other advertising company are running an informational website, or perhaps a blog or something.  Those website owners don't care whose ads are on their site because they are not trying to sell you anything except their thoughts and ideas.  Bloggers make money from readers not "buyers".  

Ok, so back to making money from Adsense.  Basically if you are looking to pay your yearly hosting cost for running your website, placing ads on your website is just the ticket.  Again, the amount of money you make is directly proportional to the amount of visitors you have to your website and about 99.99% of all websites get VERY VERY LITTLE TRAFFIC.  As a web developer I can see how much traffic websites get and I can tell you its not that much.  Usually local companies will barely get a few hits a day to their website, yet the pay off is still good because having a website makes any company, no matter the industry, appear more valid.

The general population knows that it costs money to build a website, just like a customer looks at a business owners car and they immediately assess a buiness up or down based on the type of car a person drives.

Companies that advertise on billboards are viewed as "more successful" or at least "more legitimate" because it costs money to advertise.  Websites are just another form of advertising.