3 ms·

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

by 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
  I don't think the idea is so much to grow that one site's revenue from $50 to $500 by making it a full fledge property that attracts attention. The idea is to build 400 small $50 properties that stay low-key and bring in a small but sustained amount of rev each month. From your effort, it seems like you tried to make one large property which I can see as being harder to pull off for this particular strategy.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    No, on the contrary, I tried exactly that, but it seems that some stuff develops traction and the majority simply bombs. So very few sites land on that '$1/day' target. Maybe it's my lousy aim!

by zaidf 17y ago

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
I don't think the idea is so much to grow that one site's revenue from $50 to $500 by making it a full fledge property that attracts attention. The idea is to build 400 small $50 properties that stay low-key and bring in a small but sustained amount of rev each month. From your effort, it seems like you tried to make one large property which I can see as being harder to pull off for this particular strategy.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  No, on the contrary, I tried exactly that, but it seems that some stuff develops traction and the majority simply bombs. So very few sites land on that '$1/day' target. Maybe it's my lousy aim!