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Ask HN: I made $1.01 yesterday. What next?
On Monday night I couldn't sleep. I had a domain name that I'd bought (http://fstr.net) that wasn't getting approved by the parking provider.
It was just sitting there, doing nothing and I couldn't stand it. So I thought why not put some web games on it?
So I coded... and coded ... and coded ... and by 3AM I had a page, with a database that linked up a bunch of games that were declared "embeddable" by their owner (addictinggames.com).
Tuesday, it made $0.50 on Adsense. Yesterday $1.01.
Now if only I were able to scale that up by about 80 times (using only part time labor) and I'd be able to 'take the pay cut' so I could switch into scaling it up by about 200 times for a great big raise!
Reading HN has really opened my eyes to the fact that the internet is made by people. It doesn't have to be created by corporations - but it's something that anyone can do. Holy Crap! Even me.
I just checked my profile and I've been a Hacker News reader for 94 days. With the income I've earned from this project, that's an income of over a penny a day so far... Let's see if I can ramp that up?
I want to put some time into improving the technology. Initially I was loading a random list of about 1000 games - but I've changed that to show the games sorted by order or user rank.
I've also got game tag and category data - so I can add navigation, maybe a fun, self updating 'active search' type of thing (I'm already loading the games via ajax)
I'd like to pull from other games sources - many of the big games sites allow you to host their games (since they get the linkback on the flash load screen)
Some even have revenue sharing on the ads inside the game as well.
The page desperately needs to be optimized in terms of adsense placement. I'm getting a 1.5% CTR and I've got friends who have shown me placements that they earn 30% off of. He tells me he's got optimizations that earn him 70% CTR.
I'd also like to redesign (again) so it looks a little more polished and professional. So far it's really just a ~8 hour hack job and ugly.
But earning a dollar on the first day? That's a bit encouraging. I'd love to make a real, sustainable 'gig' out of running a games site (or any site for that matter) ...
I really think HackerNews might be the type of place that has the advice I need (and might be able to warn me off of some of the pitfalls I might run into).
Anything you can tell me would be greatly appreciated (a hell of a lot cheaper than an MBA program ;).
- mobl 16y agoContact me I can help if lookin into gaming revenue. jimmy@inodesoft.com
- TamDenholm 16y agoThis isnt answering your question but i've got a quick suggestion for you dev wise. Cache those images on your front page, then stitch them together into a big sprite and then use CSS to display the specific image from the sprite. It'll greatly decrease the load time on that page. Ref: http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/ http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/
- eru 16y agoWouldn't you want to decrease load times? Or do you think people are more likely to click on an ad, if they have to wait longer?
- carbocation 16y agoDoing that would decrease load times for repeat visitors.
- TamDenholm 16y agoMy bad, i meant decrease, i've fixed it.
- eru 16y agoInline images with data URIs might perform equally well with less hackery.
- olegkikin 16y ago30% to 70% CTR is nearly impossible. You can only get it in very specific cases. 1.5% CTR is pretty good for Adsense. If you can get it up to 5%, consider yourself lucky.
- dholowiski 16y agoYeah, 70% ctr=LIE don't believe it. I think if you go a 70% ctr google would shut you down for clickfraud.
- slouch 16y agoRecently, I had to find a new copy of lame_enc.dll for a computer I just bought. Every site I landed on (besides sourceforge) had three or four "Download" buttons. I wasn't confident that ANY of them weren't ads. I'm sure those pages have a great ad CTR.
- olegkikin 16y agoThat would be against Adsense TOS, as far as I understand.
- corprew 16y agoI recently did a survey of those sites, and a large number of those links are links to other similar paid products that have more or less relevance to what they're linking to or are of the '$5/month virus check' variety.
- yread 16y agoSome of our affiliates at work have like 95% conversion. I am not sure what do they promise to give the people if they buy our stuff but it has to be pretty good
- maukdaddy 16y agoObligatory clickable: http://fstr.net http://fstr.net
- obneq 16y agolooks weird on opera. the enlarged preview for a game on mouseover gets too big for the grid, so that the entire next row is pushed back.
- AlexC04 16y agothanks :) I can't bear to even think about how it looks in IE. I'm honestly thinking of just putting an <!//--[if IE]-- sorry this website is not supported in IE, but here's an animated gif of a dancing bear for your amusement ---!> around the entire site.
- joshuacc 16y agoYou probably don't want to do this, since there is (anecdotally at least) a correlation between ad clicks and less sophisticated visitors. It may be a pain, but there's a good chance that IE users will be where you make the most money.
- zecg 16y agoI'd lose the atrocious bevel on logo, looks positively amateurish. What's wrong with plain old outlined font? Also, you need the bare minimum of added value: let users rate games. Put the ratings in a database. There, you just add some value. Alternatively, a hand-picked selection of games is more value to me as a visitor, than if you had every flash game in the universe embedded on that page. No one has the time to play all those. Choosing which ones are worthy of wasting your time is the hardest part.
- AlexC04 16y agoLogo changed. I just dropped the bevel as advised. Better? Ratings and comments "incoming" - on the list. There's a lot of feedback on here so It's going to take me a few days to prioritize everything. Facebook comments are quick though. I've done that before.
- points 16y agoDon't believe the notion that making 100 websites that earn $1 a day is easier than making 1 website that makes $100 a day. It's not. Create value, make users want to stick around, iterate, grow.
- AlexC04 16y agoOh no! I definitely want to look into making sure that this one is good enough before I look to make a second. I do have a million more projects I'd like to take on - but each of them has to play out to their maximum potential before I switch to the next. If this can make $1 in 1 day on an evening's work, how far can I get if it's actually a GOOD site? Feedback from where people see the areas of concern is useful. I've already read "Load time" in the comments as well as "game quality" and "exclusive content" Load time is one thing I'd not considered. I think the images must load quickly for me because I've got them all in my browser cache. I've changed the default sort order of the games so you're much less likely to get 'crap' on your first click than you were when they were random - but I'm working on adding categories as we speak, that way people will be able to find their genre quickly. Thanks for the feedback :)
- christopherslee 16y agohow far it gets its going to be related to how people are finding your site, and how much room you have to grow. if everyone is coming in from search, it depends how many people are searching. I have a few content sites that drive about $10CPM, but even with #1 organic ranking, I'm limited to about 1500 visitors a month. 95% of my traffic is from search. 99% of my revenue is from people that found my site from search. generally, as far as adsense goes, the common wisdom is that repeat users do not drive advertising revenue. it's the search hoppers that are the ones that often click on the ads. making the site sticky doesn't necessarily mean more adsense revenue, and here is probably where other advertising mechanisms that require high number of impressions would start to come into play. affiliate marketing might be something to look into as a supplemental as well, although i'm not sure what that is in your market.
- 16y ago
- i-like-water 16y agoCongrats on the site and getting started on a project. How are you driving visitors to the site currently?
- AlexC04 16y agohttp://imgur.com/kw2av http://imgur.com/kw2av :D ummm. ycombinator I read another comment about reddit / stumble / digg / etc... So I'll have to go there next. For today, once I get tag-navigation done (it's looking pretty sweet already) then I guess a reddit submission. Since I regularly read reddit I'll feel a little more comfortable with the community there. Hopefully they'll be as supportive as HN is :) I really do feel nervous about making sure people like it, and making sure it's good enough to show off. Showing work in progress to HN is a bit of a different story because we're all such "doers" around here. I guess I just feel "safer" starting here. (if that makes sense?)
- i-like-water 16y agoycombinator may be a good temporary boost of traffic while you're on the frontpage of HN but you'll need to look at a more sustainable way of generating traffic - this is where I struggle the most. I run an ecommerce company that does a moderate bit of traffic (around 70k uniques a month) - 70% of my traffic is PPC (Google, Yahoo/Bing) and the rest is done through organic optimization. My business has a very low repeat customer ratio due to our market (sorry can't explain this bit i don't want to share my company publicly). Here is what i've learned: I fucking hate SEO. I've spent well over 100k hiring and firing contractors from around the world. I've worked with some of the biggest names in SEO down to the most unknown people in India. We spend a lot of time trying to manipulate search engines to work the way we want them and it's all a game. If i were in your position i'd focus around creating content people WANT to use and leverage communities like this to help figure out how to improve them so WE market the product for you (this isn't easy though - you have to be EXCEPTIONAL). General SEO/SEM tactics are good to know and practice, but i really believe the best/most sustainable approach to a successful site is creating something people actually want and are willing to tell their friends about. Don't let this bit of discourage you, create something great!
- 16y ago
- chipsy 16y agoProduct differentiation would be an obvious next step: - Start growing a player community(which is how Kongregate works) - Place more extreme filters on quality or genre(this is the basis of sites like physicsgames.net). - Invest in some exclusive content. This is expensive and probably a bad idea at the early stage, but the fastest way to get started is to go onto FlashGameLicense and browse the stuff that's up for bid or auction. I would suggest taking some time to figure out your focus before you go too deeply into the site optimization, else you'll build the wrong thing.
- AlexC04 16y agoYeah - driving traffic via sponsored games would be in the long term plan. I'm still not certain if the traffic is sustainable. After all, after friends and family finish checking it out, who do I have left? Everything gets a 'blip' at the start with your first facebook post "he friends, check it out" then trickle until search engines find you. I wrote a game for KONG once. I like how it works there. (http://www.kongregate.com/games/lythrdskynrd/dizzy-ship http://www.kongregate.com/games/lythrdskynrd/dizzy-ship) There is a question of the value of sponsored game traffic VS a good PPC campaign. What point do you decide it's worth throwing a few hundred down on a sponsorship? I'm not sure :)
- davidjeffries 16y agoConsider monetizing with game related affiliate programs. There are lots of toolbars, gaming sites that pay $1-$3 CPAs which will improve your eCPM.
- ddemchuk 16y agoStart promoting it to get traffic. Leverage stumbleupon, reddit, facebook/twitter, and possibly organic. Adsense pubs who make good money have sites that get a veritable shit ton of traffic every day, or have sites with ads with incredibly high CPC amounts
- terra_t 16y agoHey, you've hit the big time. Become an angel investor and give me the $1.01, I'll turn it into $5.27 by next Tuesday.
- fletchowns 16y agoSeems like the last the web needs is another half assed Flash games site.
- eru 16y agoYou can't argue with profit.
- AlexC04 16y agoI think I'm still at my "collect underpants" phase :) (EDIT: for anyone who doesn't get the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park))
- poet 16y agoOh what a poor state the world would be in if everyone believed that. :) Side note: I have no problem with the OP's website.
- rgarcia 16y agothat's for the internet to decide
- AlexC04 16y agothis just warmed my heart a little. thank you :')
- AlexC04 16y agoDespite the -1 rank of the comment, I do appreciate the feedback. The things we build aren't always about what the internet needs, but maybe there's some value in starting small and building it into something great. I'm not trying to dominate the universe of flash game websites - but I I am utterly fascinated by the idea of earning my living and being completely in control of my own destiny. In my background I've worked for a mega-corporation (Nortel Networks, they're like Cisco systems, only bankrupt) and I've worked as a public employee (high school teacher). Nowadays I work for a smaller 40 person company ... but I'm still not my own boss. This is an entirely new concept to me. I can create value and sell it directly and I can do it according to my own rules... I 100% appreciate that this is "just another half assed flash site". I just built it to see if I could. But it made $0.50 on day one and $1.01 on day two. So maybe there's something here. If this does fizzle, at least I'll have learned something. Whatever I do pick up from this experience, I will be able to take to my next project. If this one doesn't "take" then maybe my next one will. Or maybe by sharing the experience with HN we'll all learn something. Maybe I'll make a contact with someone who's similarly minded and we'll team up to make a project that ends up being better than either of us could have done on our own. Who knows? You're 100% right though - i mean it - the internet does not need "yet another crappy flash games site" ... it's a hell of a lot better than a page-park though http://thegames.com/ http://thegames.com/
- dholowiski 16y agoOMG "it's made of people"! Yeah it's a mindblow when you realize this. But it's not made of people who spend 6 hours a night watching tv. There has never been a better time for creators, of all kind.
- leon_ 16y ago> But it's not made of people who spend 6 hours a night watching tv. Where's the difference to all the YouTube junkies who spend hours watching YT?
- justinchen 16y agoI wish that people would remember that "it's made by people" when they email customer support. Sometimes people can be so harsh.
- zacharycohn 16y agoAs someone who worked tech support for four years... this. That's why I always try to be as entertaining as possible (while still being clear and helping them solve my problem). I recently had to exchange a pair of pants that I really liked but didn't fit on an online store. I ended up describing receiving their pants "As if the mighty Norse god Thor himself rode down from Aesir with a lightning bolt in one hand and these pants in the other." I figure their lives are hard enough, might as well make them smile sometimes.
- dholowiski 16y agoI worked in technical support for 12 years. Yeah it's amazing how people treat other people over the phone or email.
- Dylanlacey 16y agoWorking in tech and retail showed me this. I decided to make it up to the world in general, in a small way. So now, every christmas, I find some of the services I use (like my bank, full of VERY helpful, friendly people) who have call centres active on Christmas day, and I ring them and say thanks and Merry Christmas. The only downside is occasionally someone will cry because a random stranger wished them a Merry Christmas because they're at work.
- leon_ 16y agoA 70% CTR will most probably get you banned.
- trizk 16y agoDont make 100 websites. Optimize this one. SEO and compelling content. There are plenty sites that can help you with SEO if you Google for them. There was even someone in the community offering services pro-bono. But do also make your website more compelling/attractive. Integrate some value added service if they give you your email. Like a high scores page or newsletter. See if you can't make the games multiplayer and get some competition going.
- imp 16y agoMake $2.00 today.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- benologist 16y agoYou might like to check out my distribution feed - loads of great games zipped up ready for distribution or embedding from a wide selection of the top devs and portals: http://playtomic.com/games/catalog http://playtomic.com/games/catalog You can pull it all in via script through the very customizable feed: http://playtomic.com/games/feed http://playtomic.com/games/feed Portals are a lot of work though. You'll need a strategy - find keywords you want to target, optimize and build links towards them etc. You can also license games through http://www.flashgamelicense.com/ http://www.flashgamelicense.com/ which gets your branding in games and funnels traffic back to you.
- Tichy 16y agoYour site crashed my browser and in turn my Mac. I never even saw it.
- benologist 16y agoReally? Weird ... I have hundreds of users and nobody's reported any problems. Was it the feed or the catalog link?
- Tichy 16y agocatalog - I must admit I force killed the browser (Firefox) after a while, but it resulted in an unkillable process. Therefore I had to hard reset the Mac.
- benologist 16y agoMight have been the straw that broke the camel's back ... it loads a couple hundred thumbnails since I haven't gotten around to paginating it / sorting that stuff out yet.
- AlexC04 16y agoOH MY GOD! :D thank you so much :)! I mean that. I've been working all day and have just uploaded a whack of improvements - categories now implemented - adsense moved around (hopefully) optimized a bit for clickyness I've actually taken some ads off the page - but I'm really interested in finding more content. At the moment, I've just been using http://addictinggames.com http://addictinggames.com (bless him, plug plug) But more sites and content will make my place much better. I'm especially in love with embeddable! I've been going at it solid since my OP without a break - so I've got to step away for a little - but I'll definitely take advantage of this :)
- benchmark 16y agoI've got a gaming website, like yours, but not as smart looking: http://www.funnygamesspot.com http://www.funnygamesspot.com What I suggest is getting a Facebook fanpage up, and corral all your friends. You could get a following for your site that will revisit it again and again. Good luck, and nice work!
- middlegeek 16y agoNice! Are you making any money on your site?
- benchmark 16y agoAverages out to less than a buck a day, so it's not a money maker by any stretch of the imagination.
- middlegeek 16y agoBravo and congrats! You have earned that first dollar. A dollar isn't always very significant in everyday life but that figurative dollar is for you. Good luck!
- ojbyrne 16y agoHmmm, having brought this here, and showing that it can be monetized relatively easily... expect competition ;-)
- listic 16y agoWith CTR of 1.5% and 245 visitors, it looks like you are making $0.5 per click. Is it true? It seems to me it's ridiculously high price, or at leaast not sustainable in the long term, isn't it? I'm learning web programming, trying to start up little sites. Please leave me your email or drop a line: nleschov at gmail
- AlexC04 16y agoemail sent. we'll have a chat and see if I can't help you out a bit :)
- user24 16y ago1.5% is really not bad at all! How much traffic do you get per day? I'd change the URL structure from numeric to keyword bases (happy to help with apache config if you like). I'd also provide a search box, powered by google search so you can still get ad clicks. Add an addthis.com button to each page to build backlinks and virality.
- AlexC04 16y agoI'm on my third day of traffic so far. Waiting for analytics to arrive. I had about 50 visitors yesterday and think I might be approaching 1000 for today :) I've upgraded to adding TAGS & Categories for links - but am still stuck with numbers on the games codes. I think you might be right though, in terms of SEO that will improve value. Unfortunately, at the moment, I'm populating the game page via ajax so google won't really know what pages I've got on there until after I follow up with those recommendations of yours. I think it's good advice though.
- user24 16y agoyeah, fstr.net/arcade-game is better than fstr.net/651 for memorability but also hugely important for SEO.
- bgraves 16y agoHow many hits did you get for the past few days? What were the traffic sources? You might be able to do more targeted advertising to bring in more users, although that would obviously cut into your meager earnings at this point. Anyways, good on you for executing on an idea! Many people don't even get to that point.
- tropin 16y agoDoes Google permit telling how much are you earning with Adsense?
- AlexC04 16y agoyikes! thanks for this comment. I'd actually just announced the earnings (as I wanted to share) - but my ignorance of their policy in this respect has given way to caution. I've deleted the post where I say the exact $ value of the earnings and instead will just say that it's managed to buy a pizza dinner.
- indiejade 16y agoPlease. Fix. Logo. It's the only part of your site that really looks outdated.
- AlexC04 16y agoThanks. In terms of everything else, I admit it's poor. I cranked it out quickly in fireworks and agree. I like the colors - but the bevel is low quality. I'll have to make an effort on the logo in round 2. :)
- andre 16y agohow are you getting the game data? going to each game and copying the info? or did you automate it?
- ryanteo 16y agoHi Alex, nice work and congrats on your first step =) Have you ever thought of specializing in showcasing just educational games/ flash games? I think it would be very valuable and it would easily catch on among parents/young kids. You could also link it to educational resources like Khan Academy, etc..
- whimsy 16y agoFree tip: http://www.reddit.com/r/webgames http://www.reddit.com/r/webgames I don't know how many of these are going to be embeddable, but I drop by there every once in a while when I feel like procrastinating and sort by "top" for this month or whatever. This is great for you because people are essentially finding games for you and crowd-sourcing a rating. The top games are usually pretty great. A handful have actually blown me away.
- newobj 16y agoHow do you drive traffic to this site? I think there's a reasonable claim to be made that your ad placement is deceptive. It looks like a navigational menu for the website. Either way, good luck :)