5 ms·

On this topic, I've always wondered how profitable it is to develop a site meant to make ad money. People love to talk about their interesting, cutting edge pro

by xeonoex 10y ago

On this topic, I've always wondered how profitable it is to develop a site meant to make ad money. People love to talk about their interesting, cutting edge projects on HN, but no one talks about making websites whose main purpose is ad revenue. The web is littered with clickbait sites and sites that just make money off of Amazon affiliate links. The people that create them usually don't share their revenue, although sites like buzzfeed make a ton of money. It makes me wonder if it's a good idea (in regards to passive side-income) to make a benevolent site that appeals to the general population or a niche with targeted, unobtrusive ads, rather than trying to make the next amazing service or killer app.

Godel_unicode 10y ago
I can't speak for other niches, but the travel and personal finance crowd have a large number of such sites. Given that they always appear to start as "one dude's thoughts on travel" and turn into multiple people writing for the site, I think the answer to your question is, "you can make money at it". From your question, I think you already knowthe reason you don't hear about it on here. An Amazon affiliate powered blog doesn't have to be written in Haskell, use microservices, invent some new AI technique, and Change The World™ with a self-driving basic income. It just makes money with well-understood technologies and business models.
csallen 10y ago
I make a decent amount of money from ad revenue for Indie Hackers every month. You can see a breakdown of my traffic and revenue stats for January in this blog post: https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/month-in-review-2017-01 https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/month-in-review-2017-01. After focusing on this type of revenue for about 3-4 months, here are my takeaways: * If you're going to use affiliate links, e.g. Amazon, then you really need the content on your site to appeal to people who have an intent to buy. For example, nobody really comes to Indie Hackers to buy hosting, so affiliate links for hosting companies don't do well. However, people come to learn more about building profitable online businesses, so links to websites and books and other educational resources in that area get lots of clicks. (This is true of any business, really: understand your customer and provide what they want, not what you want to sell.) * I haven't tried Google Adsense, because I find the ads ugly. But I do use BuySellAds, and the revenue isn't great. I make something like $1 per 1000 visits. It probably doesn't help that ad-blockers tend to block these ads (unless you render them server-side). * If your audience fits into a valuable niche, individual advertisers are often willing to pay quite a lot for some real estate. Of course, this requires some manual upfront outreach on your part, but it's easier to do than it sounds. I've had 20 minute phone calls that resulted in $1000 or $2000 ad buys. EDIT: Also, if you're going to run a content site, create a newsletter that visitors can subscribe to. Make sure it goes out at least twice a month, so people don't forget who you are and unsubscribe. (You can completely automate it if you don't want to spend time maintaining it.) Newsletters are valuable real estate for ad revenue, and they also help you build an audience that you can potentially sell to if you ever create a product in the future. In fact, a newsletter can be your entire business: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630163
- franciscop 10y ago
  Congrats on your recent 100 posts Which makes me bring the question, is it worth it? $3.500 / 100 posts = $35 / post (per month) = $420 / post (per year) I understand it's a marathon though and that value compounds. When you had 10 posts you were probably not making $350 and when you have 1000 posts you will probably be making a lot more than $35.000. I'd love to see the associated human costs and how many hours/week you are spending here, doing what and how that has evolved from the beginning (more automation, new challenges, etc).
  - csallen 10y ago
    I do some time tracking in my monthly blog post (scroll down to the chart), so you can actually see exactly how much time I'm spending. Is the revenue so far worth the time I put into it? No, not by itself. But everything that I've done so far is really a launching pad for more, bigger, and better things, so I see it as an investment. At the very least, I've reached a point where I can survive on my own and work on my own projects indefinitely. Beyond that, I've built up an audience and community that I love, and I've got lots of plans in the works to try and deliver even more value to them + generate revenue in a more scalable way.
    - franciscop 10y ago
      I totally didn't mean it in a bad way, I'm an open-source person ( https://github.com/franciscop/ https://github.com/franciscop/ ) and do it because I love it, both writing code, learning and the community. I'm curious because I'm thinking on how to get some money out of it to be able to keep doing what I love. I'll read more about it, thanks!
- vram22 10y ago
  >You can completely automate it if you don't want to spend time maintaining it. What do you mean by "completely automate". MailChimp or similar tools, or something more automated?
  - 10y ago
bjourne 10y ago
Last I heard, the majority of those sites don't make enough money to cover the expense of the domain name (ie $10/year). Note that with most ad networks, you need to deliver a minimum number of clicks or impressions per month or you won't get paid anything.
jetti 10y ago
I put up a site that is nothing but affiliate linking to Amazon. It is selling programming books but I actually am putting work into it to ensure that only highly rated programming books are listed as well as highly rated books on newer programming languages. In the first week I've made 5 sales, though none of them have shipped yet, which will net me around $5 which is enough to cover server costs. I figured that even if I don't make money I'm learning a lot about deploying Phoenix/Elixir applications as well as just web config in general as this is my first actual website (if you don't count my Diablo guild website from back in the mid 90s)
dplgk 10y ago
People have been doing this for years and years. It's a grind and it's very boring and usually done by people that don't have that much technical skill. Go check out the Wicked Fire forums if you're interested.

by xeonoex 10y ago

Godel_unicode 10y ago

I can't speak for other niches, but the travel and personal finance crowd have a large number of such sites. Given that they always appear to start as "one dude's thoughts on travel" and turn into multiple people writing for the site, I think the answer to your question is, "you can make money at it". From your question, I think you already knowthe reason you don't hear about it on here. An Amazon affiliate powered blog doesn't have to be written in Haskell, use microservices, invent some new AI technique, and Change The World™ with a self-driving basic income. It just makes money with well-understood technologies and business models.

csallen 10y ago

I make a decent amount of money from ad revenue for Indie Hackers every month. You can see a breakdown of my traffic and revenue stats for January in this blog post: https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/month-in-review-2017-01 https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/month-in-review-2017-01. After focusing on this type of revenue for about 3-4 months, here are my takeaways: * If you're going to use affiliate links, e.g. Amazon, then you really need the content on your site to appeal to people who have an intent to buy. For example, nobody really comes to Indie Hackers to buy hosting, so affiliate links for hosting companies don't do well. However, people come to learn more about building profitable online businesses, so links to websites and books and other educational resources in that area get lots of clicks. (This is true of any business, really: understand your customer and provide what they want, not what you want to sell.) * I haven't tried Google Adsense, because I find the ads ugly. But I do use BuySellAds, and the revenue isn't great. I make something like $1 per 1000 visits. It probably doesn't help that ad-blockers tend to block these ads (unless you render them server-side). * If your audience fits into a valuable niche, individual advertisers are often willing to pay quite a lot for some real estate. Of course, this requires some manual upfront outreach on your part, but it's easier to do than it sounds. I've had 20 minute phone calls that resulted in $1000 or $2000 ad buys. EDIT: Also, if you're going to run a content site, create a newsletter that visitors can subscribe to. Make sure it goes out at least twice a month, so people don't forget who you are and unsubscribe. (You can completely automate it if you don't want to spend time maintaining it.) Newsletters are valuable real estate for ad revenue, and they also help you build an audience that you can potentially sell to if you ever create a product in the future. In fact, a newsletter can be your entire business: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630163

franciscop 10y ago
Congrats on your recent 100 posts Which makes me bring the question, is it worth it? $3.500 / 100 posts = $35 / post (per month) = $420 / post (per year) I understand it's a marathon though and that value compounds. When you had 10 posts you were probably not making $350 and when you have 1000 posts you will probably be making a lot more than $35.000. I'd love to see the associated human costs and how many hours/week you are spending here, doing what and how that has evolved from the beginning (more automation, new challenges, etc).
- csallen 10y ago
  I do some time tracking in my monthly blog post (scroll down to the chart), so you can actually see exactly how much time I'm spending. Is the revenue so far worth the time I put into it? No, not by itself. But everything that I've done so far is really a launching pad for more, bigger, and better things, so I see it as an investment. At the very least, I've reached a point where I can survive on my own and work on my own projects indefinitely. Beyond that, I've built up an audience and community that I love, and I've got lots of plans in the works to try and deliver even more value to them + generate revenue in a more scalable way.
  - franciscop 10y ago
    I totally didn't mean it in a bad way, I'm an open-source person ( https://github.com/franciscop/ https://github.com/franciscop/ ) and do it because I love it, both writing code, learning and the community. I'm curious because I'm thinking on how to get some money out of it to be able to keep doing what I love. I'll read more about it, thanks!
vram22 10y ago
>You can completely automate it if you don't want to spend time maintaining it. What do you mean by "completely automate". MailChimp or similar tools, or something more automated?
- 10y ago

bjourne 10y ago

Last I heard, the majority of those sites don't make enough money to cover the expense of the domain name (ie $10/year). Note that with most ad networks, you need to deliver a minimum number of clicks or impressions per month or you won't get paid anything.

jetti 10y ago

I put up a site that is nothing but affiliate linking to Amazon. It is selling programming books but I actually am putting work into it to ensure that only highly rated programming books are listed as well as highly rated books on newer programming languages. In the first week I've made 5 sales, though none of them have shipped yet, which will net me around $5 which is enough to cover server costs. I figured that even if I don't make money I'm learning a lot about deploying Phoenix/Elixir applications as well as just web config in general as this is my first actual website (if you don't count my Diablo guild website from back in the mid 90s)

dplgk 10y ago

People have been doing this for years and years. It's a grind and it's very boring and usually done by people that don't have that much technical skill. Go check out the Wicked Fire forums if you're interested.