How do websites make money??

The websites that most of us use today, are free and even when you register or sign up it's free. But no one would make something that wouldn't make them money. To answer this question I have researched about this and this is how it works:

The great thing about an income generating website is that you do not even need to sell anything directly yourself.

You create a website about any subject you want, you attract loads of free visitors to it from search engines, some of whom will click on adverts and links to other sites. This bit is where the answer comes: you get paid either for every advert click or whenever someone buys something from one of the other sites you provide a link to.

Now just take a look at this link which is from the Time Magazine: Time Magazine list of the 50 best websites. Out of 50 of them, 36 are advertising supported, 18 of those rely on Google and 7. This list is the short answer to the question we wanted to find out.