how can you make money off of free web sites

Could you possibly be more specific? Are you saying to start a free website that you make money on?

I’ll swallow my dignity and say that I know there are plenty of “porn proxies” that are free websites that host galleries of paid porn sites, in order to trap people looking for porn on the internet. They make money through the advertising of the paid porn sites.

Most free web-sites have some sort of ads that generate a lot of money for websites. Fluther is completely free and makes most of its money from Advertising,

On the other hand, there are web sites that are completely free and have no advertising whatsoever. For example, my friend David runs a publishing service called Tumblr.com which has gotten extremely popular over the past few months and yet there are no ads whatsoever on Tumblr. The reason for doing so is to attract more initial users and then once you have over the certain amount of ads, you can roll-out optional paid features (similar to what Picnik.com did) or put tiny ads on the bottom

ads?
try google adsense

This ia a recent article in WIRED that explains the “new” business model for the Web:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16–03/ff_free

SRM

That link didn’t work. :(