4 ms·

This article is silly, and just wrong in every way. It totally discounts time spent doing these projects, and totally fails to understand expected value. For in

This article is silly, and just wrong in every way. It totally discounts time spent doing these projects, and totally fails to understand expected value. For instance: "I wrote a desktop software once, and priced it at $29.90. I sold one copy a month, which was terrible. That's $1 a day. It's really easy as a programmer to do something that makes $1 a day." I suppose if that desktop software took an hour to make it would be worth it in a few months. More likely it took an amount of time that would better have been spent (from a purely financial perspective) working at Wal-Mart and then investing the funds in an ETF. To make $1 a day ($365/yr) takes only around $4k (what a good programmer earns in <2 weeks) tossed into the market. Thus any project that takes you longer than that for $1/day in return is a waste. Also even if you assumed every project would net $1 per day, you'd still be better off thinking big. A hit Facebook app, for instance, might make $10,000 a day. (A megahit 10x that.) A good keyword to arbitrage via an affiliate account and AdSense could do the same. You're far better off taking a 1% shot at $10k/day than a 100% shot at $1. (You're far better off taking a .1% shot.) You might say "well what about variance" but apparently you have the time to create 400 products. Also, Twitter followers have done little of real value for anyone in terms of making a business profitable. On the list of ways to get customers to your web-based business, Twitter's still pretty far down the chain. A far better plan would be to try to create one product that makes $1 per person you drive to it. This is doable. Then you can buy users for far less with ads, roll your profits into more ads, rinse, repeat. This is how people like me who rarely if ever use Twitter have made oodles from the web. (I've done this now multiple times, for reference.)

zaidf 17y ago
Matt, a huge part that I think he has left out is the use of outsourcing stuff offshore. A lot of his projects seem to be content plays. You can get lots of content produced offshore for very cheap. The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that hard. Give 2 hours per blog post per site. And in a 9hrs day, you can cover 3-4 sites, averaging out to about 2 blog posts/month per site--which can be profitable in the big scheme of things. When quality is not a huge consideration, you can get a lot of cheap stuff done offshore.
- mattmaroon 17y ago
  Is he advocating splogging? I didn't gather that at all from his post, and if so that's on par with advocating spamming.
  - zaidf 17y ago
    Depends what your definition of splogging is. I don't think its a black and white thing with lots of gray. I don't think creating 500 blogs and getting UNIQUE content written for it is splogging. I do think spamming other people's blogs in comments with your blog url is splogging.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  I'd still not give you odds on making more than $1 per 'project' per day though. Factoring in all the costs you'd be very happy to be a bit above break even after a year with tons of 'content' ripped by mfa sites that don't do all the work and that don't invest the money. They'll be making your profit. And at $1 / day per project you're not going to spend any time suing the infringers either.
  - zaidf 17y ago
    It's totally doable IMO. A friend of mine who knows nothing more than how to setup a wordpress(answer: get her bf to do it) wrote 20 posts and forgot about the blog. She gets ~$50 check from google every month. She was laughing about it. The life time value of her blog post is pretty cool! I don't know if it scales(I'm presuming it does from posts like the OP). But hey I like the initial numbers.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      Cool! But to prove it works you need to scale it, and that's where the hard part sits I think. I fell for it in just that way. This all started with http://www.clustercompute.com/ http://www.clustercompute.com/ A small site about a project that I built years ago. I rebuilt it using drupal, and the template had a nice spot for a google ad in it so I thought oh well, whatever, let's do that. To my surprise it made some money! Hey I thought, that's easy, let's do that some more. And that's when I ran in to the statistics of the thing, when the numbers get larger the payout seems to drop considerably. $50 per month is great as 'found' income, and as long as your site is small you'll be able to stay under the radar of the cloners, but as soon as you start getting significant traffic (as in show up on alexas 100,000 or so) then you're going to be cloned left right and center. You'll be competing with your own content on 20 other sites. Even on HN we get plenty of 'blogspam' submissions that are basically nothing but the original article quoted with a one line addition (if that).

zaidf 17y ago

Matt, a huge part that I think he has left out is the use of outsourcing stuff offshore. A lot of his projects seem to be content plays. You can get lots of content produced offshore for very cheap. The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that hard. Give 2 hours per blog post per site. And in a 9hrs day, you can cover 3-4 sites, averaging out to about 2 blog posts/month per site--which can be profitable in the big scheme of things. When quality is not a huge consideration, you can get a lot of cheap stuff done offshore.

mattmaroon 17y ago
Is he advocating splogging? I didn't gather that at all from his post, and if so that's on par with advocating spamming.
- zaidf 17y ago
  Depends what your definition of splogging is. I don't think its a black and white thing with lots of gray. I don't think creating 500 blogs and getting UNIQUE content written for it is splogging. I do think spamming other people's blogs in comments with your blog url is splogging.
jacquesm 17y ago
I'd still not give you odds on making more than $1 per 'project' per day though. Factoring in all the costs you'd be very happy to be a bit above break even after a year with tons of 'content' ripped by mfa sites that don't do all the work and that don't invest the money. They'll be making your profit. And at $1 / day per project you're not going to spend any time suing the infringers either.
- zaidf 17y ago
  It's totally doable IMO. A friend of mine who knows nothing more than how to setup a wordpress(answer: get her bf to do it) wrote 20 posts and forgot about the blog. She gets ~$50 check from google every month. She was laughing about it. The life time value of her blog post is pretty cool! I don't know if it scales(I'm presuming it does from posts like the OP). But hey I like the initial numbers.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Cool! But to prove it works you need to scale it, and that's where the hard part sits I think. I fell for it in just that way. This all started with http://www.clustercompute.com/ http://www.clustercompute.com/ A small site about a project that I built years ago. I rebuilt it using drupal, and the template had a nice spot for a google ad in it so I thought oh well, whatever, let's do that. To my surprise it made some money! Hey I thought, that's easy, let's do that some more. And that's when I ran in to the statistics of the thing, when the numbers get larger the payout seems to drop considerably. $50 per month is great as 'found' income, and as long as your site is small you'll be able to stay under the radar of the cloners, but as soon as you start getting significant traffic (as in show up on alexas 100,000 or so) then you're going to be cloned left right and center. You'll be competing with your own content on 20 other sites. Even on HN we get plenty of 'blogspam' submissions that are basically nothing but the original article quoted with a one line addition (if that).