23 ms·

Inside a viral website

787 points by panic 5y ago

dx034 5y ago
Interestingly, according to [1] there were only ~11k visitors from Hackernews for a post on the front page that had ~1k comments. I would've estimated the visitor/comment ratio to be much, much higher. [1] https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_source=istheshipstillstuck.com&utm_content=badge https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_sour...
- tomjohnneill 5y ago
  I only put simple analytics on the site the day after it was at the top of Hacker News (unfortunately)
  - tomjohnneill 5y ago
    For what it's worth (and I know this is getting extremely meta), but as it stands this writeup has had 21,963 visitors from Hacker News. (205 comments as I write this).
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Besides the analytics being added later (as mentioned), personally I see a headline sometimes and think "yeah I know enough, show me the comments". Does HN show viewing stats for comments? Might be nice for the sites featured on it to know.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- themanmaran 5y ago
  I had a HN frontpage post a couple months ago. The results: - 250 upvotes - 101 comments - 6,675 site views (over the 1.5 days it was frontpage)
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  Every post is different. Viral or click bait stuff on "hot" topics can foster a lot of insubstantive and often fighty comments. That's a known phenomenon on the site.
- mtberatwork 5y ago
  Users tend to overwhelmingly read headlines and skip articles. HN is not any different than the rest of the Web. Something to keep in mind here and elsewhere.
oefrha 5y ago
> These reports aren’t just limited to the products you recommend — if someone buys anything within a 24 hour period of clicking your link, you can see, and you get commission. Anyone else find this a pretty gross violation of privacy on Amazon’s part? Why should your unrelated purchases be disclosed to affiliates just because you clicked an affiliate link for whatever reason? Let’s say the affiliate website use accounts or know the identities of users through another channel, and track outbound clicks. With few enough clicks, they can exactly correlate your unrelated purchases with you, if I understand this correctly. In fact it seems you can easily prank unsuspecting acquaintances this way. To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting commission on random stuff. Edit: I can also see why the data could be valuable to marketers.
- artembugara 5y ago
  I think it's simply because you do forward someone on a website. Also, imagine it's not Amazon but a much smaller website. Just bringing a client (someone who actually paid) is already a good deal. So, I believe it's a totally fair commission rule.
  - oefrha 5y ago
    I made it very clear that I have no problem with the commission paid: > To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting commission on random stuff. The problem is disclosing random purchases. You can pay a commission without that disclosure.
    - artembugara 5y ago
      Ah damn. I somehow misread your initial message. My bad.
- joekrill 5y ago
  You can't match up the product with an actual user or person in any way.
  - 5y ago
alexey2020 5y ago
So much enjoyed the reading! I like that kind of stuff - nothing serious and lots of fun. Well done!
artembugara 5y ago
Neat. Could anyone give me some ideas how else the author could monetize this without normal ads? Also, what would be the gain if he did normal ads?
- tomjohnneill 5y ago
  So I did in the end apply to Google AdSense just to find out. Turns out the site didn't get approved because it didn't have enough content on it. So I think you would be hard pushed to monetise it quickly by going down the normal display ads route. I didn't mention in the post, but I had a couple of random ad offers, but they were for things that I didn't really agree with so didn't take up any of the offers.
  - artembugara 5y ago
    Thx. How is it possible that it's not you again who posted this on HN?
    - tomjohnneill 5y ago
      Ha. I came on here to post it myself this time. Turns out I was beaten to it.
- brianmorris10 5y ago
  Swag. Set up some shitty designs on one of those dropshipping sites and a storefront. Mugs, hoodies, etc.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    Yup, viral content and events are great for 'commemorative' swag, and there's plenty of companies that offer print-on-demand for things like that. One time I experienced a "trending topic" first (or second)hand; the app we were building accidentally sent a pair of test notifications to 2-3 million people, first the test message, then a second saying "zodat Hajo het ook gelooft" (so that Hajo (name) believes it too). That took the daytime internet by storm; news articles, radio segments, twitter trending topic, etc. I mainly followed the topic on Twitter, and before long there were adverts on there selling swag related to the trending topic. There's companies (or even bots?) scanning Twitter, making swag-on-demand for trending topics.
cyberlab 5y ago
> A single-purpose website The more fashionable term is Single Serving Site[0], and is a phrase originally coined by Jason Kottke. You can find more of these types of sites here: https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/ https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/ [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-serving_site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-serving_site
- pjmorris 5y ago
  I first saw 'single serving friend' in Fight Club [0], do you think the idea was lifted from there? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1iQp8g9SQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1iQp8g9SQo
  - cyberlab 5y ago
    Kottke's article[0] is in 2008, after Fight Club's release in 1999, so you may be right, he probably lifted it from Fight Club. You can always email him to confirm! [0] https://kottke.org/08/02/single-serving-sites https://kottke.org/08/02/single-serving-sites
  - kamel3d 5y ago
    in 2016 I made a single serving website it's only purpose is to copy emojis to your clipboard, it is kinda popular now it gets 6K users a day but moste of the visits are from Russia so it is a bit hard to monetise www.emojilo.com
    - StavrosK 5y ago
      I have needed that often, thanks for making an easy site!
      - iamacyborg 5y ago
        Windows + ; is the shortcut you want if you're on Windows.
    - O_o_O_o_0 5y ago
meibo 5y ago
I really don't want to sound elitist, but building something like this with a big JS framework and immediately jumping to monetize it?(NFTs are gross and undermine any message or intention, even just to be "funny") This could have been a 20kb html page on a CDN or on GitHub. But I don't work in web dev so maybe my mind just doesn't go to these lengths immediately.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  In the OP he explains he used next.js cause he was familiar with it so could quickly implement it, and he made like maybe $300 from the whole thing thing, only like $40 from the NFT the rest from affiliate links (not enough to cover the time he spent on it at any reasonable rate were you working for someone else; would have been $70 less if his hosting company hadn't given him an unexpected freebie). In the OP he comes off pretty well, just a guy looking to experiment and do something fun, see what happened, try different things. (If he had been serious about revenue generation and prepared, I am pretty sure he could have made a lot more money from this with that many impressions; that wasn't his focus). You can experiment and do something fun irresponsibly (trolling) or responsibly (caring about the user experience and accuracy, not trying to rip anyone off), it sounds like he did it pretty responsibly. (I guess the rickroll is a bit grey area!) I also appreciate him sharing the details transparently. Assuming his story in the OP is truthful, which I think it probably is. [I think NFT's are really dumb, I think it was kind of a funny joke to have an NFT there, and interesting to see his report-back about the process of issuing an NFT. There aren't a lot of people being transparent about their experience with NFTs!]
- isakkeyten 5y ago
  This is actually a well done web app in my opinion. You can disable javascript and the app loads just fine. JS is used as a progressive enhancement to hydrate. Probably uses something like NextJS in the background. The HTML with inlined critical styles load in ~40ms on my internet. Sure it could be "better" in terms of TTI from the JS side but at what cost?
- antoinec 5y ago
  Looks like he wanted to experiment different things, which becomes a lot more interesting when thousands of people are coming to your app. And he knew it was only going to be the case for a limited amount of time, so enjoying as much as possible having an audience was probably the best thing to do!
runj__ 5y ago
So THATS why I was Rickrolled the other day...
- SamBam 5y ago
  I'm a little confused about this point. The website had a random timer, and was then opening a tab in the background? I thought that modern browsers required a direct user-interaction to cause a new tab to appear, such as a click. I thought this was how we got out of the pop-up hell of the 90s?
  - ejones 5y ago
    It just navigated the page itself by assigning window.location.href, which isn't subject to the same restrictions as popups.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - whizzter 5y ago
    Reading some of these I think that many people have the same usage-pattern as I do, ie go to some aggregator site like HN and open a bunch of articles in one sweep and then read them. So what happened was that the site opened in a tab, people didn't get to it immediately so when they got around to it the timer had fired and they were rickrolled.
    - SamBam 5y ago
      Ah, got it, yes re-reading the tweets I see that this is what happened.
  - corobo 5y ago
    The page just refreshed. No new tabs.
austhrow743 5y ago
Was wondering just yesterday how much those book affiliate links made. Before reading my guess would have been way higher.
mromanuk 5y ago
> As was pointed out in a quote tweet by the Vercel CEO, the problem wasn’t Next.js at all, but the Vesselfinder embedded map taking a while to load (because everyone wanted to check the Ever Given’s status) That was an opportunity, to cache the map as an image, and switch it later to the proper map.
- DangerousPie 5y ago
  But is it worth the trouble for a meme site that won’t be relevant in a week? There are probably more fun things to do with your time.
  - rainonmoon 5y ago
    He minted the site as an NFT. Dude had time.
    - swrj 5y ago
      I would guess that minting a site as a NFT on OpenSea takes a whole lot less time than making that change. As for if it's more fun - that's debatable...
camillomiller 5y ago
The main takeaway for me: > In my day job, we use Next.js for almost everything we build. It’s a framework built on top of React that just strips out almost all the complexity of building fairly complicated websites. Obviously, this wasn’t a complicated website, but I went with what I’m most familiar with. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail :D Edit to say that I think it's an amazing little wholesome project and the author's very funny. Didn't want my comment to sound too harsh. :)
- soneca 5y ago
  Well, in my view this was actually a very fitting nail for the hammer he had.
  - camillomiller 5y ago
    I disagree, most of what the website does wouldn't necessarily need all the next.js superstructure. It's a very simple and modular page. That said, mine definitely wasn't a strong criticism. I also think the process explanation was very enjoyable.
    - soneca 5y ago
      In this sense, I see Nextjs more like a Swiss Army knife than a hammer. And the author (and the Vercel CEO tweets) explained that he used the exact right tools of it. In the end, it was a static page that handled an incredible amount of traffic.
    - redisman 5y ago
      This is a news event related meme site. Of course you should use what you have muscle memory for so you can ship it in one day. Who cares if some other framework the author doesn't know would have done the job
      - camillomiller 5y ago
        This comment is gold. Big news: There’s intelligent life outside frameworks.
simias 5y ago
>Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the page. I’d read a fair amount about NFTs (both good and bad), and I was a mix of sceptical and curious. I thought this would be an interesting and weird opportunity to try it out myself. Added to this, it could be a fun meta-meme. I thought it would be fun to be the first meme website to sell itself as an NFT. I don't quite understand, what was sold here exactly? You can't sell the DNS since ".com" doesn't exist on the blockchain (you could for a NameCoin domain, but who uses that). So is it like a capture of the source code? Or is it really just a token saying "istheshipstillstuck.com"? I can sort of get NFTs when it's about selling digital artwork since it's a way for the artist to generate artificial scarcity for something that's technically endlessly copiable and it creates a notion of what's "the original". After all, IP laws and regulations are full of that stuff (cue the "what colour are your bits" essay). But here there's already a digital token that's unique and can be auctioned: the domain name itself. It's pretty obvious to me that the "true" istheshipstillstuck.com will be whoever owns the DNS, not some random person with an NFT token.
- xyzelement 5y ago
  I think he's just playing around/being cheeky with all this stuff, so I don't think it was ever meant to stand up to robust scrutiny :>
  - simias 5y ago
    I completely get that, but I was thinking from the point of view of the person who decided to put $200 into the joke.
- platz 5y ago
  even with art, an NFT doesn't confer copyright rights, so you don't even own the art. > a way for the artist to generate artificial scarcity The art isn't stored on-chain, so it's not scarce either. All the NFT is is a pointer that has some text about who created it and what it points to. Not sure why why that pointer itself is valuable except as a status of "i am the only one that owns this unique pointer". Of course there's nothing stopping anyone from creating another pointer that points to the same thing as the one you just bought and selling that. So unless you find some value in pointers, intrinsically in themselves, NFT's are useless.
ape4 5y ago
We need a website for the Mars helicopter: isthemarshelicopterflyingyet.com
- josefresco 5y ago
  ...or maybe havetheyfoundlifeonotherplanetsyet.com
sixQuarks 5y ago
Running a viral site by yourself is one of the most enjoyable feelings, like you have this big laboratory to play and test out things out with. And it was quite easy to do back in the early days of the Internet. I ran one such site in the early 2000s, which attracted 30 million page views per month at its peak. Like the author, I kept trying all kinds of things to monetize it, at the end affiliate programs and google Adsense worked the best.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
One thing I don't understand about monetizing on the Internet. I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment? Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or Stripe or whatever, collect the money and declare it as donations on the IRS form? Why try all these convoluted schemes, instead of giving a straightforward way for people to tip? They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax.
- brentm 5y ago
  The best path probably would of been getting in touch with Flexport and getting them to sponsor it for a couple grand + hosting.
- twox2 5y ago
  Who would pay $1 for getting a chuckle out of a meme? Also 50 million views is not 50 million visitors. If he had a normal ad monetization channel in place, he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM and walked away with at least $5k from his 15 minutes of fame. The problem is that learning as you go makes it a little too late to monetize the peak. There are companies whose entire business is in pumping out viral sites like this. Some explode for a a little while and others never make a penny. You can bet your butt that in the hands of someone who does this professionally these 50 million views would have been thousands and thousands of dollars.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I would, particularly if the blurb was very honest (or very creative). I have no trouble throwing someone even a one-time $5 if the website is funny enough.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      How often do you do this per month? How many webpages do you read per month? Now divide one by the other.
underdeserver 5y ago
This is a glowing recommendation for Vercel. I might use it for my next side project.
dave_sullivan 5y ago
I appreciated the breakdown of steps involved in selling an NFT. Cool writeup.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  It was especially funny right after admitting the hosting cost was 70$, but he then spent 70$ x 2 to get 200$ in unusable NFT credits.
- DangerousPie 5y ago
  Yeah, that was actually really interesting to me.
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  Yeah, except for entirely glossing over the environmental aspect of that process.
  - lancesells 5y ago
    While I agree on there being environmental costs and NFTs seemingly terribly wasteful (since it's a digital file) have you considered the costs of what people buy in their day to day? I would love to see what the environmental comparison of an NBA NFT is compared to producing a souvenir basketball. My guess would be that it's lower and more renewable but I could be wrong.
    - iamacyborg 5y ago
      > have you considered the costs of what people buy in their day to day? Yes. It's not relevant to this discussion. The author did not need to mint an NFT and there was clearly no real demand for one. Creating an NBA NFT and then managing the ongoing bids will produce orders of magnitude more CO2 than selling a souvenir ball. Quartz recently published a good breakdown comparing selling and shipping a print vs selling an NFT https://qz.com/1987590/the-carbon-footprint-of-creating-and-selling-an-nft-artwork/ https://qz.com/1987590/the-carbon-footprint-of-creating-and-...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ldbooth 5y ago
250k rickrolled. That is hilarious. Wish I checked the site during that period.
devops000 5y ago
Instead of wasting time with NFT you should have contacted Flexport for a partnership
tambourine_man 5y ago
> I found this exchange very fun This guy is such a good sport. Unsolicited and impolite random critics of your tech stack on Twitter: fun.
IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago
It is fascinating how our online behavior deviates from our physical world behavior. This whole thread is about how asking for donations is a big fail online. Yet, there's no lack of street performers in most major metros. Whether that is people in superhero costumes on Hollywood Blvd, or street dancers in times square, they all seem to be doing fine off donations. There is something about the online "free duplicate copy" concept that just makes value dissappear
- vulcan01 5y ago
  > they all seem to be doing fine off donations. They may be doing fine, but I bet that, for most, donations aren't their only source of income and they probably have another job.
- elevaet 5y ago
  Maybe it's not the "free duplicate copy" making the value disappear, but that the social context makes us feel anonymous and less obliged to reciprocate on the web. We're a social species that evolved in tribes. Street performers probably do a better job of stimulating that sense of tribe than abstract interactions on a web page do.
- bemmu 5y ago
  Donations seem to work for livecasters though. Maybe the donation button needs to give some response like that from the creator to work?
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  >Whether that is people in superhero costumes on Hollywood Blvd, or street dancers in times square, they all seem to be doing fine off donations. All websites are not comparable to Times Square or Hollywood Blvd, in terms of how much attention they get. You also don't see performers in 99.99% of cities, even in other areas of the same city like NYC and LA.
- paxys 5y ago
  Yup, people are just wired to think of physical vs digital goods or experiences very differently. Cliche comparison by now, but I know so many people who will spend $4 on a Starbucks latte every day, but the thought of spending $4 a month on a web app that they use for hours every day is unimaginable.
rikroots 5y ago
> Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the page [...] In the end it was successful, selling for just over $200 ... It was at this point in the read that I got very excited and broke away from the article to research "NFTs"[1] - because I've been known to create digital art[2] and I've even written a JS library to help people create digital art[3] (kinda). Luckily I got interrupted during my research and, once the interruption completed, I returned to the article rather than my research tabs - which were closed pretty quickly after the read completed. > Most of the things I’ve posted [to Twitter] are liked exclusively by my colleagues, my Mum and my ex-flatmate. It’s screaming into the void. My Mother doesn't do social media. I doubt she'd approve of the words I choose to scream. [1] https://www.creativebloq.com/features/what-are-nfts https://www.creativebloq.com/features/what-are-nfts - "NFTs use a monster amount of energy in their creation. So much so that many protesters are worried about the very real impact the craze could have on the environment" ... this is seriously scary; it puts me off the whole idea of trying to monetise my creative work in this way. [2] https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv - my collection of generative art on CodePen [3] https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/ https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/
crazypython 5y ago
This is terribly overengineered. He just needs a static CDN host– such as Surge.sh, Netlify, AWS CloudFront, or Cloudflare. Everything can be calculated clientside. > It’s worth pointing out that for all the criticism, the Next.js + Vercel combination meant that I didn’t have to worry about scaling the site at any point. There were millions of hits, and sometimes thousands per second, and it all just worked. The basic page continued to load in less than half a second under all that load. Static sites have that too.
- jackdh 5y ago
  S3 + Cloudfront would have worked like a charm.
- migueloller 5y ago
  It was a static site. That's what Vercel and Next.js does by default. If you don't use `getServerSideProps`, Next.js will generate static pages at build time and Vercel will serve them from their CDN.
- tomjohnneill 5y ago
  The point is that NextJS does create a static site. And Vercel can be just a static CDN, as it was for this.
l00sed 5y ago
I'd love if someone could point me in the direction of WHY this Next.js setup "just works". This was a great article, and the author described the sensation of getting traffic very well. I've been on the other side of the coin where my apache server crashed or 50* error'd out. It would be interesting to know more about what makes this stack or this server architecture "just work" under the hug of death.
- quicksnap 5y ago
  I've been working with Next for a couple of weeks, here's my take: - Next.js aims for "pit of success" in building sites with React that are optimized for CDNs and small builds - Deploying said sites to Vercel takes advantage of the CDNs, so most of the users are getting cached data. So, for this site, I would assume: - There is no backend - All the HTML is cached and contains a static generation of the page(s) - The javascript is also cached - Vercel CDN is fast. That's it!
  - tomglynch 5y ago
    Would it being cached mean that when the ship became unstuck, and the website changed from 'Yes' to 'Sort Of' or to 'No', that people who were checking back would receive an incorrect cached version?
    - noahtallen 5y ago
      The new copy is pushed to the CDN pretty quickly. I don’t know much about vercel. But the benefit of CDNs is that there is a 1:N relationship between you and the edge servers, and then an N:M relationship from the edge servers to the users. So there are a lot more servers much closer to people using your site. Pushing a new copy from “you” to each edge server is pretty straightforward. I imagine Vercel does it pretty quickly, but sometimes the edge server could poll for changes maybe once a minute, which is pretty cheap to do.
- gherkinnn 5y ago
  Adding to quicksnap's points: - Next.js makes it dead-easy to statically generate your pages using various strategies. And static pages take few resources to serve. [0] - It also gives you lots of info on bundle sizes, performance, and provides you with the tools to manage these. - Vercel is optimised to serve these static pages on their CDN. [1] And your project quite literally a single terminal command away from being live. - Both are very easy to get started with and a joy to use. - I am in no way affiliated with Vercel. I just like their products. [0] https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching [1] https://vercel.com/docs/edge-network/overview https://vercel.com/docs/edge-network/overview
srmarm 5y ago
It's a bit of a time limited joke and not a business. If it was done as a business and ad heavy it wouldn't be shared so much. Seems to me the best monetisation he could do is selling himself. Even a couple hours work off the back of it would have been beating any ad's etc. I had a minor web hit in the 90s, tried to do affiliate links etc but nothing really worked but I did get a little bit of work from it that has been indirectly the launch pad for a few side projects. None made me rich but they've all been a step forward.
- Breza 5y ago
  Good perspective. This blog post is a start. If I were him, I'd try to get my fifteen minutes in the press. Whenever a prospective employer searches his name even years in the future, they'll see "this guy made a really popular website!" That's great marketing.
migueloller 5y ago
I know the HN comments section is notorious for criticizing solutions they don't like because they seem too complex or unnecessary for them [1] but I'm honestly surprised that's happening with Next.js/Vercel here. So many are saying that this could've been a static site distributed by a CDN. That's what a Next.js app on Vercel does by default! Unless you use `getServerSideProps`, Next.js will create a static site at build time and when deployed to Vercel it will be hosted on their CDN. Spending just a bit of time to understand why Next.js is so popular would've made that clear to most people here. But I guess that's not as easy as just criticizing it for bloat without knowing how it works and moving on? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- sneak 5y ago
  Javascript aside, more things can and should be static sites. (More things should render their basic, static-site content without having to exec js, too.) The web would be a lot better if this were the case.
  - migueloller 5y ago
    I believe you can still do this in Next.js with some extra work to exclude the JS bundle. For example, you can use a custom `_document` page and exclude the `NextScript` component [1]. It would be nice if this was supported as a first-class concept, though. [1] https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/custom-document https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/custom-document
worik 5y ago
Well done! Almost perfect.
zepearl 5y ago
Great article - funny & interesting :) Question about "Ads/advertisements" (I'm totally clueless about how they work): Does anybody have a link pointing to some kind of overview from the point of view of a website owner? (e.g. list of different providers, amounts paid by views/clicks, which informations are/can be exchanged with them to provide for example an ad in the same context of what the website is showing, etc...?) Personally as a user, I would not be against ads if they would be normal ones like in a newspaper/magazine, but many show full-fledged small&big animations => I get angry when I see my CPU usage at 100%/my fan spinning up/my battery depleting while reading on such a page, which is the main if not the only reason why I block them (I might even be interested in them, but they screw up my PC/notebook) => as a website owner do you have control on what kind of ads you want to show (technically speaking - like "animated" vs. "static", with how many fps, etc...)?
- glaucon 5y ago
  The wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising is a starting place. There is also a vast swag of stuff related to digital marketing here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Online_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Online_advertising but it will require significant digging to work out what's useful for your interest. Also this part of the ads.google.com site https://ads.google.com/intl/en_NZ/home/resources/advanced/ https://ads.google.com/intl/en_NZ/home/resources/advanced/ has a reasonable amount of stuff within it but obviously only from a Google point of view. I don't suppose it matters but that's the NZ version of the page, probably only the 0800 number is specific to NZ but you might change en_NZ to whatever your language code is.
nickjj 5y ago
This reminds me of the toilet paper site from last year. From no traffic to 10+ million visitors and being featured on late night talk shows. It was 6 lines of JavaScript and took 20 minutes to build but peaked at making $5,000 a day from ads. I ended up chatting with its creator on how he built and hosted it at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/35-determine-what-your-toilet-paper-supply-is-based-on-your-usage https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/35-determine-what-yo.... But since then it looks like he transferred the site to someone else because now it's an e-commerce shop instead of a toilet paper calculator like it once was.
frakkingcylons 5y ago
Regarding the Amazon affiliate marketing bit: I am surprised he didn’t make at least an order of magnitude more money from the clicks. I ran a site that was popular on a niche subreddit in 2013-2014 which had Amazon affiliate links. On the very first day when the site was the top post, the resulting affiliate commissions were over $500. And most of them were not for products that were linked to on the site. The lifetime commissions earned was about $11K from a total of maybe 100K unique visitors. The biggest contributor to the commissions were unrelated expensive purchases that visitors made later on Amazon. I’m curious if the affiliate program changed in the 8 years since.
- O_o_O_o_0 5y ago
  which subreddit
pbrw 5y ago
I wonder why almost the same website didn't go viral at such scale. Even though it was published earlier.
ketamine__ 5y ago
I would tip with BAT. http://brave.com/creators http://brave.com/creators
0veruler 5y ago
This is insane and I love it. Lol
flerp 5y ago
I hope he got money from Vercel for writing that article :)
3xasperated 5y ago
Great Read
TheSisko 5y ago
This is amazing. I've built a handful of SSS over the years and can't get enough of these insider accounts. You rarely see breakdowns as thorough as this!

787 points by panic 5y ago

Interestingly, according to [1] there were only ~11k visitors from Hackernews for a post on the front page that had ~1k comments. I would've estimated the visitor/comment ratio to be much, much higher. [1] https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_source=istheshipstillstuck.com&utm_content=badge https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_sour...

tomjohnneill 5y ago
I only put simple analytics on the site the day after it was at the top of Hacker News (unfortunately)
- tomjohnneill 5y ago
  For what it's worth (and I know this is getting extremely meta), but as it stands this writeup has had 21,963 visitors from Hacker News. (205 comments as I write this).
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Besides the analytics being added later (as mentioned), personally I see a headline sometimes and think "yeah I know enough, show me the comments". Does HN show viewing stats for comments? Might be nice for the sites featured on it to know.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
themanmaran 5y ago
I had a HN frontpage post a couple months ago. The results: - 250 upvotes - 101 comments - 6,675 site views (over the 1.5 days it was frontpage)
DoreenMichele 5y ago
Every post is different. Viral or click bait stuff on "hot" topics can foster a lot of insubstantive and often fighty comments. That's a known phenomenon on the site.
mtberatwork 5y ago
Users tend to overwhelmingly read headlines and skip articles. HN is not any different than the rest of the Web. Something to keep in mind here and elsewhere.

oefrha 5y ago

> These reports aren’t just limited to the products you recommend — if someone buys anything within a 24 hour period of clicking your link, you can see, and you get commission. Anyone else find this a pretty gross violation of privacy on Amazon’s part? Why should your unrelated purchases be disclosed to affiliates just because you clicked an affiliate link for whatever reason? Let’s say the affiliate website use accounts or know the identities of users through another channel, and track outbound clicks. With few enough clicks, they can exactly correlate your unrelated purchases with you, if I understand this correctly. In fact it seems you can easily prank unsuspecting acquaintances this way. To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting commission on random stuff. Edit: I can also see why the data could be valuable to marketers.

artembugara 5y ago
I think it's simply because you do forward someone on a website. Also, imagine it's not Amazon but a much smaller website. Just bringing a client (someone who actually paid) is already a good deal. So, I believe it's a totally fair commission rule.
- oefrha 5y ago
  I made it very clear that I have no problem with the commission paid: > To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting commission on random stuff. The problem is disclosing random purchases. You can pay a commission without that disclosure.
  - artembugara 5y ago
    Ah damn. I somehow misread your initial message. My bad.
joekrill 5y ago
You can't match up the product with an actual user or person in any way.
- 5y ago

alexey2020 5y ago

So much enjoyed the reading! I like that kind of stuff - nothing serious and lots of fun. Well done!

artembugara 5y ago

Neat. Could anyone give me some ideas how else the author could monetize this without normal ads? Also, what would be the gain if he did normal ads?

tomjohnneill 5y ago
So I did in the end apply to Google AdSense just to find out. Turns out the site didn't get approved because it didn't have enough content on it. So I think you would be hard pushed to monetise it quickly by going down the normal display ads route. I didn't mention in the post, but I had a couple of random ad offers, but they were for things that I didn't really agree with so didn't take up any of the offers.
- artembugara 5y ago
  Thx. How is it possible that it's not you again who posted this on HN?
  - tomjohnneill 5y ago
    Ha. I came on here to post it myself this time. Turns out I was beaten to it.
brianmorris10 5y ago
Swag. Set up some shitty designs on one of those dropshipping sites and a storefront. Mugs, hoodies, etc.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Yup, viral content and events are great for 'commemorative' swag, and there's plenty of companies that offer print-on-demand for things like that. One time I experienced a "trending topic" first (or second)hand; the app we were building accidentally sent a pair of test notifications to 2-3 million people, first the test message, then a second saying "zodat Hajo het ook gelooft" (so that Hajo (name) believes it too). That took the daytime internet by storm; news articles, radio segments, twitter trending topic, etc. I mainly followed the topic on Twitter, and before long there were adverts on there selling swag related to the trending topic. There's companies (or even bots?) scanning Twitter, making swag-on-demand for trending topics.

cyberlab 5y ago

> A single-purpose website The more fashionable term is Single Serving Site[0], and is a phrase originally coined by Jason Kottke. You can find more of these types of sites here: https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/ https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/ [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-serving_site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-serving_site

pjmorris 5y ago
I first saw 'single serving friend' in Fight Club [0], do you think the idea was lifted from there? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1iQp8g9SQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1iQp8g9SQo
- cyberlab 5y ago
  Kottke's article[0] is in 2008, after Fight Club's release in 1999, so you may be right, he probably lifted it from Fight Club. You can always email him to confirm! [0] https://kottke.org/08/02/single-serving-sites https://kottke.org/08/02/single-serving-sites
- kamel3d 5y ago
  in 2016 I made a single serving website it's only purpose is to copy emojis to your clipboard, it is kinda popular now it gets 6K users a day but moste of the visits are from Russia so it is a bit hard to monetise www.emojilo.com
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    I have needed that often, thanks for making an easy site!
    - iamacyborg 5y ago
      Windows + ; is the shortcut you want if you're on Windows.
  - O_o_O_o_0 5y ago

meibo 5y ago

I really don't want to sound elitist, but building something like this with a big JS framework and immediately jumping to monetize it?(NFTs are gross and undermine any message or intention, even just to be "funny") This could have been a 20kb html page on a CDN or on GitHub. But I don't work in web dev so maybe my mind just doesn't go to these lengths immediately.

jrochkind1 5y ago
In the OP he explains he used next.js cause he was familiar with it so could quickly implement it, and he made like maybe $300 from the whole thing thing, only like $40 from the NFT the rest from affiliate links (not enough to cover the time he spent on it at any reasonable rate were you working for someone else; would have been $70 less if his hosting company hadn't given him an unexpected freebie). In the OP he comes off pretty well, just a guy looking to experiment and do something fun, see what happened, try different things. (If he had been serious about revenue generation and prepared, I am pretty sure he could have made a lot more money from this with that many impressions; that wasn't his focus). You can experiment and do something fun irresponsibly (trolling) or responsibly (caring about the user experience and accuracy, not trying to rip anyone off), it sounds like he did it pretty responsibly. (I guess the rickroll is a bit grey area!) I also appreciate him sharing the details transparently. Assuming his story in the OP is truthful, which I think it probably is. [I think NFT's are really dumb, I think it was kind of a funny joke to have an NFT there, and interesting to see his report-back about the process of issuing an NFT. There aren't a lot of people being transparent about their experience with NFTs!]
isakkeyten 5y ago
This is actually a well done web app in my opinion. You can disable javascript and the app loads just fine. JS is used as a progressive enhancement to hydrate. Probably uses something like NextJS in the background. The HTML with inlined critical styles load in ~40ms on my internet. Sure it could be "better" in terms of TTI from the JS side but at what cost?
antoinec 5y ago
Looks like he wanted to experiment different things, which becomes a lot more interesting when thousands of people are coming to your app. And he knew it was only going to be the case for a limited amount of time, so enjoying as much as possible having an audience was probably the best thing to do!

runj__ 5y ago

So THATS why I was Rickrolled the other day...

SamBam 5y ago
I'm a little confused about this point. The website had a random timer, and was then opening a tab in the background? I thought that modern browsers required a direct user-interaction to cause a new tab to appear, such as a click. I thought this was how we got out of the pop-up hell of the 90s?
- ejones 5y ago
  It just navigated the page itself by assigning window.location.href, which isn't subject to the same restrictions as popups.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- whizzter 5y ago
  Reading some of these I think that many people have the same usage-pattern as I do, ie go to some aggregator site like HN and open a bunch of articles in one sweep and then read them. So what happened was that the site opened in a tab, people didn't get to it immediately so when they got around to it the timer had fired and they were rickrolled.
  - SamBam 5y ago
    Ah, got it, yes re-reading the tweets I see that this is what happened.
- corobo 5y ago
  The page just refreshed. No new tabs.

austhrow743 5y ago

Was wondering just yesterday how much those book affiliate links made. Before reading my guess would have been way higher.

mromanuk 5y ago

> As was pointed out in a quote tweet by the Vercel CEO, the problem wasn’t Next.js at all, but the Vesselfinder embedded map taking a while to load (because everyone wanted to check the Ever Given’s status) That was an opportunity, to cache the map as an image, and switch it later to the proper map.

DangerousPie 5y ago
But is it worth the trouble for a meme site that won’t be relevant in a week? There are probably more fun things to do with your time.
- rainonmoon 5y ago
  He minted the site as an NFT. Dude had time.
  - swrj 5y ago
    I would guess that minting a site as a NFT on OpenSea takes a whole lot less time than making that change. As for if it's more fun - that's debatable...

camillomiller 5y ago

The main takeaway for me: > In my day job, we use Next.js for almost everything we build. It’s a framework built on top of React that just strips out almost all the complexity of building fairly complicated websites. Obviously, this wasn’t a complicated website, but I went with what I’m most familiar with. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail :D Edit to say that I think it's an amazing little wholesome project and the author's very funny. Didn't want my comment to sound too harsh. :)

soneca 5y ago
Well, in my view this was actually a very fitting nail for the hammer he had.
- camillomiller 5y ago
  I disagree, most of what the website does wouldn't necessarily need all the next.js superstructure. It's a very simple and modular page. That said, mine definitely wasn't a strong criticism. I also think the process explanation was very enjoyable.
  - soneca 5y ago
    In this sense, I see Nextjs more like a Swiss Army knife than a hammer. And the author (and the Vercel CEO tweets) explained that he used the exact right tools of it. In the end, it was a static page that handled an incredible amount of traffic.
  - redisman 5y ago
    This is a news event related meme site. Of course you should use what you have muscle memory for so you can ship it in one day. Who cares if some other framework the author doesn't know would have done the job
    - camillomiller 5y ago
      This comment is gold. Big news: There’s intelligent life outside frameworks.

simias 5y ago

>Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the page. I’d read a fair amount about NFTs (both good and bad), and I was a mix of sceptical and curious. I thought this would be an interesting and weird opportunity to try it out myself. Added to this, it could be a fun meta-meme. I thought it would be fun to be the first meme website to sell itself as an NFT. I don't quite understand, what was sold here exactly? You can't sell the DNS since ".com" doesn't exist on the blockchain (you could for a NameCoin domain, but who uses that). So is it like a capture of the source code? Or is it really just a token saying "istheshipstillstuck.com"? I can sort of get NFTs when it's about selling digital artwork since it's a way for the artist to generate artificial scarcity for something that's technically endlessly copiable and it creates a notion of what's "the original". After all, IP laws and regulations are full of that stuff (cue the "what colour are your bits" essay). But here there's already a digital token that's unique and can be auctioned: the domain name itself. It's pretty obvious to me that the "true" istheshipstillstuck.com will be whoever owns the DNS, not some random person with an NFT token.

xyzelement 5y ago
I think he's just playing around/being cheeky with all this stuff, so I don't think it was ever meant to stand up to robust scrutiny :>
- simias 5y ago
  I completely get that, but I was thinking from the point of view of the person who decided to put $200 into the joke.
platz 5y ago
even with art, an NFT doesn't confer copyright rights, so you don't even own the art. > a way for the artist to generate artificial scarcity The art isn't stored on-chain, so it's not scarce either. All the NFT is is a pointer that has some text about who created it and what it points to. Not sure why why that pointer itself is valuable except as a status of "i am the only one that owns this unique pointer". Of course there's nothing stopping anyone from creating another pointer that points to the same thing as the one you just bought and selling that. So unless you find some value in pointers, intrinsically in themselves, NFT's are useless.

ape4 5y ago

We need a website for the Mars helicopter: isthemarshelicopterflyingyet.com

josefresco 5y ago
...or maybe havetheyfoundlifeonotherplanetsyet.com

sixQuarks 5y ago

Running a viral site by yourself is one of the most enjoyable feelings, like you have this big laboratory to play and test out things out with. And it was quite easy to do back in the early days of the Internet. I ran one such site in the early 2000s, which attracted 30 million page views per month at its peak. Like the author, I kept trying all kinds of things to monetize it, at the end affiliate programs and google Adsense worked the best.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

One thing I don't understand about monetizing on the Internet. I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment? Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or Stripe or whatever, collect the money and declare it as donations on the IRS form? Why try all these convoluted schemes, instead of giving a straightforward way for people to tip? They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax.

brentm 5y ago
The best path probably would of been getting in touch with Flexport and getting them to sponsor it for a couple grand + hosting.
twox2 5y ago
Who would pay $1 for getting a chuckle out of a meme? Also 50 million views is not 50 million visitors. If he had a normal ad monetization channel in place, he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM and walked away with at least $5k from his 15 minutes of fame. The problem is that learning as you go makes it a little too late to monetize the peak. There are companies whose entire business is in pumping out viral sites like this. Some explode for a a little while and others never make a penny. You can bet your butt that in the hands of someone who does this professionally these 50 million views would have been thousands and thousands of dollars.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I would, particularly if the blurb was very honest (or very creative). I have no trouble throwing someone even a one-time $5 if the website is funny enough.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    How often do you do this per month? How many webpages do you read per month? Now divide one by the other.

underdeserver 5y ago

This is a glowing recommendation for Vercel. I might use it for my next side project.

dave_sullivan 5y ago

I appreciated the breakdown of steps involved in selling an NFT. Cool writeup.

ehsankia 5y ago
It was especially funny right after admitting the hosting cost was 70$, but he then spent 70$ x 2 to get 200$ in unusable NFT credits.
DangerousPie 5y ago
Yeah, that was actually really interesting to me.
iamacyborg 5y ago
Yeah, except for entirely glossing over the environmental aspect of that process.
- lancesells 5y ago
  While I agree on there being environmental costs and NFTs seemingly terribly wasteful (since it's a digital file) have you considered the costs of what people buy in their day to day? I would love to see what the environmental comparison of an NBA NFT is compared to producing a souvenir basketball. My guess would be that it's lower and more renewable but I could be wrong.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    > have you considered the costs of what people buy in their day to day? Yes. It's not relevant to this discussion. The author did not need to mint an NFT and there was clearly no real demand for one. Creating an NBA NFT and then managing the ongoing bids will produce orders of magnitude more CO2 than selling a souvenir ball. Quartz recently published a good breakdown comparing selling and shipping a print vs selling an NFT https://qz.com/1987590/the-carbon-footprint-of-creating-and-selling-an-nft-artwork/ https://qz.com/1987590/the-carbon-footprint-of-creating-and-...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ldbooth 5y ago

250k rickrolled. That is hilarious. Wish I checked the site during that period.

devops000 5y ago

Instead of wasting time with NFT you should have contacted Flexport for a partnership

tambourine_man 5y ago

> I found this exchange very fun This guy is such a good sport. Unsolicited and impolite random critics of your tech stack on Twitter: fun.

IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago

It is fascinating how our online behavior deviates from our physical world behavior. This whole thread is about how asking for donations is a big fail online. Yet, there's no lack of street performers in most major metros. Whether that is people in superhero costumes on Hollywood Blvd, or street dancers in times square, they all seem to be doing fine off donations. There is something about the online "free duplicate copy" concept that just makes value dissappear

vulcan01 5y ago
> they all seem to be doing fine off donations. They may be doing fine, but I bet that, for most, donations aren't their only source of income and they probably have another job.
elevaet 5y ago
Maybe it's not the "free duplicate copy" making the value disappear, but that the social context makes us feel anonymous and less obliged to reciprocate on the web. We're a social species that evolved in tribes. Street performers probably do a better job of stimulating that sense of tribe than abstract interactions on a web page do.
bemmu 5y ago
Donations seem to work for livecasters though. Maybe the donation button needs to give some response like that from the creator to work?
lotsofpulp 5y ago
>Whether that is people in superhero costumes on Hollywood Blvd, or street dancers in times square, they all seem to be doing fine off donations. All websites are not comparable to Times Square or Hollywood Blvd, in terms of how much attention they get. You also don't see performers in 99.99% of cities, even in other areas of the same city like NYC and LA.
paxys 5y ago
Yup, people are just wired to think of physical vs digital goods or experiences very differently. Cliche comparison by now, but I know so many people who will spend $4 on a Starbucks latte every day, but the thought of spending $4 a month on a web app that they use for hours every day is unimaginable.

rikroots 5y ago

> Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the page [...] In the end it was successful, selling for just over $200 ... It was at this point in the read that I got very excited and broke away from the article to research "NFTs"[1] - because I've been known to create digital art[2] and I've even written a JS library to help people create digital art[3] (kinda). Luckily I got interrupted during my research and, once the interruption completed, I returned to the article rather than my research tabs - which were closed pretty quickly after the read completed. > Most of the things I’ve posted [to Twitter] are liked exclusively by my colleagues, my Mum and my ex-flatmate. It’s screaming into the void. My Mother doesn't do social media. I doubt she'd approve of the words I choose to scream. [1] https://www.creativebloq.com/features/what-are-nfts https://www.creativebloq.com/features/what-are-nfts - "NFTs use a monster amount of energy in their creation. So much so that many protesters are worried about the very real impact the craze could have on the environment" ... this is seriously scary; it puts me off the whole idea of trying to monetise my creative work in this way. [2] https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv - my collection of generative art on CodePen [3] https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/ https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/

crazypython 5y ago

This is terribly overengineered. He just needs a static CDN host– such as Surge.sh, Netlify, AWS CloudFront, or Cloudflare. Everything can be calculated clientside. > It’s worth pointing out that for all the criticism, the Next.js + Vercel combination meant that I didn’t have to worry about scaling the site at any point. There were millions of hits, and sometimes thousands per second, and it all just worked. The basic page continued to load in less than half a second under all that load. Static sites have that too.

jackdh 5y ago
S3 + Cloudfront would have worked like a charm.
migueloller 5y ago
It was a static site. That's what Vercel and Next.js does by default. If you don't use `getServerSideProps`, Next.js will generate static pages at build time and Vercel will serve them from their CDN.
tomjohnneill 5y ago
The point is that NextJS does create a static site. And Vercel can be just a static CDN, as it was for this.

l00sed 5y ago

I'd love if someone could point me in the direction of WHY this Next.js setup "just works". This was a great article, and the author described the sensation of getting traffic very well. I've been on the other side of the coin where my apache server crashed or 50* error'd out. It would be interesting to know more about what makes this stack or this server architecture "just work" under the hug of death.

quicksnap 5y ago
I've been working with Next for a couple of weeks, here's my take: - Next.js aims for "pit of success" in building sites with React that are optimized for CDNs and small builds - Deploying said sites to Vercel takes advantage of the CDNs, so most of the users are getting cached data. So, for this site, I would assume: - There is no backend - All the HTML is cached and contains a static generation of the page(s) - The javascript is also cached - Vercel CDN is fast. That's it!
- tomglynch 5y ago
  Would it being cached mean that when the ship became unstuck, and the website changed from 'Yes' to 'Sort Of' or to 'No', that people who were checking back would receive an incorrect cached version?
  - noahtallen 5y ago
    The new copy is pushed to the CDN pretty quickly. I don’t know much about vercel. But the benefit of CDNs is that there is a 1:N relationship between you and the edge servers, and then an N:M relationship from the edge servers to the users. So there are a lot more servers much closer to people using your site. Pushing a new copy from “you” to each edge server is pretty straightforward. I imagine Vercel does it pretty quickly, but sometimes the edge server could poll for changes maybe once a minute, which is pretty cheap to do.
gherkinnn 5y ago
Adding to quicksnap's points: - Next.js makes it dead-easy to statically generate your pages using various strategies. And static pages take few resources to serve. [0] - It also gives you lots of info on bundle sizes, performance, and provides you with the tools to manage these. - Vercel is optimised to serve these static pages on their CDN. [1] And your project quite literally a single terminal command away from being live. - Both are very easy to get started with and a joy to use. - I am in no way affiliated with Vercel. I just like their products. [0] https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching [1] https://vercel.com/docs/edge-network/overview https://vercel.com/docs/edge-network/overview

srmarm 5y ago

It's a bit of a time limited joke and not a business. If it was done as a business and ad heavy it wouldn't be shared so much. Seems to me the best monetisation he could do is selling himself. Even a couple hours work off the back of it would have been beating any ad's etc. I had a minor web hit in the 90s, tried to do affiliate links etc but nothing really worked but I did get a little bit of work from it that has been indirectly the launch pad for a few side projects. None made me rich but they've all been a step forward.

Breza 5y ago
Good perspective. This blog post is a start. If I were him, I'd try to get my fifteen minutes in the press. Whenever a prospective employer searches his name even years in the future, they'll see "this guy made a really popular website!" That's great marketing.

migueloller 5y ago

I know the HN comments section is notorious for criticizing solutions they don't like because they seem too complex or unnecessary for them [1] but I'm honestly surprised that's happening with Next.js/Vercel here. So many are saying that this could've been a static site distributed by a CDN. That's what a Next.js app on Vercel does by default! Unless you use `getServerSideProps`, Next.js will create a static site at build time and when deployed to Vercel it will be hosted on their CDN. Spending just a bit of time to understand why Next.js is so popular would've made that clear to most people here. But I guess that's not as easy as just criticizing it for bloat without knowing how it works and moving on? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

sneak 5y ago
Javascript aside, more things can and should be static sites. (More things should render their basic, static-site content without having to exec js, too.) The web would be a lot better if this were the case.
- migueloller 5y ago
  I believe you can still do this in Next.js with some extra work to exclude the JS bundle. For example, you can use a custom `_document` page and exclude the `NextScript` component [1]. It would be nice if this was supported as a first-class concept, though. [1] https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/custom-document https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/custom-document

worik 5y ago

Well done! Almost perfect.

zepearl 5y ago

Great article - funny & interesting :) Question about "Ads/advertisements" (I'm totally clueless about how they work): Does anybody have a link pointing to some kind of overview from the point of view of a website owner? (e.g. list of different providers, amounts paid by views/clicks, which informations are/can be exchanged with them to provide for example an ad in the same context of what the website is showing, etc...?) Personally as a user, I would not be against ads if they would be normal ones like in a newspaper/magazine, but many show full-fledged small&big animations => I get angry when I see my CPU usage at 100%/my fan spinning up/my battery depleting while reading on such a page, which is the main if not the only reason why I block them (I might even be interested in them, but they screw up my PC/notebook) => as a website owner do you have control on what kind of ads you want to show (technically speaking - like "animated" vs. "static", with how many fps, etc...)?

glaucon 5y ago
The wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising is a starting place. There is also a vast swag of stuff related to digital marketing here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Online_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Online_advertising but it will require significant digging to work out what's useful for your interest. Also this part of the ads.google.com site https://ads.google.com/intl/en_NZ/home/resources/advanced/ https://ads.google.com/intl/en_NZ/home/resources/advanced/ has a reasonable amount of stuff within it but obviously only from a Google point of view. I don't suppose it matters but that's the NZ version of the page, probably only the 0800 number is specific to NZ but you might change en_NZ to whatever your language code is.

nickjj 5y ago

This reminds me of the toilet paper site from last year. From no traffic to 10+ million visitors and being featured on late night talk shows. It was 6 lines of JavaScript and took 20 minutes to build but peaked at making $5,000 a day from ads. I ended up chatting with its creator on how he built and hosted it at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/35-determine-what-your-toilet-paper-supply-is-based-on-your-usage https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/35-determine-what-yo.... But since then it looks like he transferred the site to someone else because now it's an e-commerce shop instead of a toilet paper calculator like it once was.

frakkingcylons 5y ago

Regarding the Amazon affiliate marketing bit: I am surprised he didn’t make at least an order of magnitude more money from the clicks. I ran a site that was popular on a niche subreddit in 2013-2014 which had Amazon affiliate links. On the very first day when the site was the top post, the resulting affiliate commissions were over $500. And most of them were not for products that were linked to on the site. The lifetime commissions earned was about $11K from a total of maybe 100K unique visitors. The biggest contributor to the commissions were unrelated expensive purchases that visitors made later on Amazon. I’m curious if the affiliate program changed in the 8 years since.

O_o_O_o_0 5y ago
which subreddit

pbrw 5y ago

I wonder why almost the same website didn't go viral at such scale. Even though it was published earlier.

ketamine__ 5y ago

I would tip with BAT. http://brave.com/creators http://brave.com/creators

0veruler 5y ago

This is insane and I love it. Lol

flerp 5y ago

I hope he got money from Vercel for writing that article :)

3xasperated 5y ago

Great Read

TheSisko 5y ago

This is amazing. I've built a handful of SSS over the years and can't get enough of these insider accounts. You rarely see breakdowns as thorough as this!