I take it you just want me to answer the wider question of whether people make decent money from data feed sites?

The short answer is: Yes, there is very decent money to be made from building sites out of data feeds. We have several customers who make a very healthy income from it, i.e. it’s their main source of income (no day job, etc.).

But, just to be clear: sticking up a website with 20,000 products (or posts) is not a ticket to instant riches. Like every website, work needs to be done to make sure the search engines find the site and find it relevant for the right search terms. SEO tactics will need to be employed, even if only at a basic level.

I would also recommend this approach: if you have a product catalog of 20,000 products, chances are you will have a better chance of success with the search engines, and therefore traffic, if you segment that catalog into niches and build a site per niche, perhaps with a few thousand products per site, each one targetting specific keywords (niches).

So, taking Football Fanatics as an example of a merchant with a data feed (over 165,00 items) based on American Football merchandise, I personally would not stick up one big website based on ‘American Football.’ I would do my keyword research and find what people were looking for e.g. build a website per the top ten most searched for teams, or build a site selling replica helmets – it is generally simple to edit the data feed into the segments you want and use a segment per site.

-Fiona