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Ask HN: My site's popular. How would YOU monetise it?
Hey guys, the server bill's getting pretty big now. I'd like to start setting up some paid accounts pretty soon. Apart from crawling people more often, can you see any creative ways to give extra benefits to paid members? Any suggestions appreciated. :-)
- dustyreagan 17y agoMight I suggest http://FeaturedUsers.com http://FeaturedUsers.com? It's a Twitter application ad network for users who want to promote their Twitter account. It integrates into your site w/ 1 line of Javascript. Full disclosure, it's my project. :)
- TimH 17y agoHey Dusty, I had a look at your site a few days ago and followed you on twitter. I was interested until I had a look at a few of the people advertising themselves. The ones I saw looked pretty boring. ;-) I would be interested in talking to you more about it though. tmhaines at googles mail system.
- pxlpshr 17y agoI know a few people using Dusty's service, for most it covered the hosting bills and has much better returns than Google AdSense. He's putting a lot of energy into making it even better. I suggest diversifying your ad real estate, at least initially, there's no reason you can't have Featured Users + Adsense + Deck, etc. Just don't go overboard with the # of ads on the screen, you'll drive people away. You may also try using Google AdManager or OpenX and selling ads yourself. I prefer the former because Google handles the hosting.
- jbr 17y agoDeck is exclusive. From http://www.decknetwork.net/ http://www.decknetwork.net/ > Only a single ad will be shown for each page viewed. I hear it's a pretty sweet deal, though.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- sobriquet 17y agonice work, it's fun to get some of the best stuff out there that doesn't seem to be made up like tfln or fml 1) Add tipjoy functionality, encouraging users to tip the best/funniest/helpful tweets. 2) charge referral fee to users who you scrape. Each new follower they get from favstar.fm costs $0.10 (seems like many of the people you are featuring are self-employed or creative types who would probably like more followers) 3) sponsored favoriters... allow brands/users who want their profile pic to show up as if they had favorited a tweet. pay per impression or click basis (they could get creative with the profile pics to grab attention) 4) promotion of top favorites across the web. build plug and play modules that people can add to their own sites, my yahoo, igoogle, their facebook page, etc. (or maybe just an RSS feed). Anyone can post it to their own site for entertainment value, but the only tweets that are eligible for the module are ones from paid accounts. Trouble is, the best/funniest twitter users probably wont want to pay for that distribution, they don't need it.
- drusenko 17y agoWhat's your definition of popular? I can't find any stats on your site that show any reasonable levels of traffic that would allow it to be either ad or freemium supported.
- TimH 17y agoHey guys, the server bill's getting pretty big now. I'd like to start setting up some paid accounts pretty soon. Apart from crawling people more often, can you see any creative ways to give extra benefits to paid members? Any suggestions appreciated. :-)
- larryfreeman 17y agoYou might want to check out the story behind HotOrNot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_or_Not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_or_Not They were in a similar situation and according to Wikipedia, they sold in 2008 for a rumored $20 million. They started in 2000 and I believe they made a deal with their internet service to reduce cost.
- matt1 17y agoFounders at Work details HotOrNot's launch. If I remember correctly, they worked out a deal with Rackspace where Rackspace would provide hosting and HotOrNot would promote the fledgling hosting company whenever they could.
- naz 17y agoAdsense would be a good place to start
- josefresco 17y agoAgreed. It's boring but starts you along the path to eventually selling your own ads. I'd also recommend highly targeted affiliate programs, which can pay better than AdSense and give you more control over who/what is shown.
- larryfreeman 17y agoI would say register with a site like Quantcast.com so you can publicly quantify popularity of your site. This gives bloggers and businesses easy access to your numbers. People like to talk with popular sites. You might want to check out Chris Anderson's book on Free: the Future of a Radical Price as a good source for brainstorming business models.
- vulpes 17y agoI don't think you'd be able to get people to pay for premium features...what would they be anyways? I do have 1 idea: Sponsored tweet placement. Companies are probably willing to pay extra money for certain tweets to get special placement. Besides that you should get retweets/replies working, i wanted to RT a few things and got put off by the coming soon box.
- bravura 17y agoSponsored tweets sounds good to me too.
- gojomo 17y agoIndeed -- something a little like StumbleUpon's model, where a declared percentage of displayed items are actually paid placement, could work. Payment could even be in the form of "virtual favorite points" -- ranked score is real favorites + bought favorites, though with some cap to prevent the list from becoming all paid. (OTOH, 'favoriting' isn't hard to fake, is it? So as soon as being atop your list is economically valuable, it may become dominated by spam.)
- nbhat 17y agoSponsored tweets are a good idea. But results are best when companies get to target the audience based on their interest. For example, a company would more likely to spend to show ads on specific search term than all the search term. So if you can find a way to categorize the people visiting your site based on retweets or fav patterns and have separate categories of favs then you can have targeted sponsored tweets.
- mahmud 17y agoVirtual goods. Go super edgy, forget flowers.gif and hugs.png: vices sell, introduce liquor, hookers and hard drugs. Maybe even go deep on the cultural references, even be a little harsh and xenophobic. Virtual gifts have a general positive connotation because they're usually given to friends, on facebook and other closed social networks. Twittering is a place for adversaries, a perfect play ground for irony and everything anti. As a super premium: allow people to upload their own text and graphics for a dollar, and attach that to the tweet. @squarejaw bought *victim* a pair of nads @ironical sends you a touching violin solo on a miniature DVD @citygirl sends you another pair of pink polo shirts to wear over all your others etc.
- TimH 17y agoInteresting idea. Would anyone here actually pay for virtual goods? Examples? I can't say I ever have on facebook apps etc..
- mahmud 17y agoyou as an individual are too much of a small sample size for the recognition of any pattern; and a self-selected sample of your peers is too biased. That's why God created market studies and published research. Hint, 12% of Americans bought Virtual goods online. Worth 1.8 billion. http://gigaom.com/2009/07/30/12-of-americans-bought-virtual-goods-in-past-12-months-survey/ http://gigaom.com/2009/07/30/12-of-americans-bought-virtual-...
- whatusername 17y agoYeah but there's a big difference between buying a parrot-secrets ebook (or buying Horse Armour in Oblivion or new tracks in Guitar Hero) and buying "flowers" on facebook.
- TimH 17y agoThank you. I'm pretty happy to see this. Will investigate. Even if it's 10% true, that's pretty healthy.
- 17y ago
- jbr 17y agoMaybe deck network (http://decknetwork.net/ http://decknetwork.net/) or fusion ads (http://fusionads.net/ http://fusionads.net/)?
- trafficlight 17y agoThe Deck is by invitation only.
- pierattt 17y agoThey're both by invitation only.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jbr 17y agoChecked it out; Deck is invite only but has contact info "for more information" -- it's exclusive, but that doesn't mean you can't poke them to see if you can get in. They probably have pretty strict design and traffic requirements, though, since they're high-end.
- unohoo 17y agoI really didnt see why some of the tweets were being favorited. Based on their content, i'd agree with vulpes above - it'd be pretty difficult to get ppl to pay $$. Sponsored placement sounds like a good idea. Another suggestion, although not monetization related - provide a widget of say the top favorited / top favorited users - that bloggers could embed on their blog - increases distribution.
- grass123 17y agoI found a small problem on your site (for me at least). For reference, I am running Firefox 3.5 on Gentoo. On a page like this, http://favstar.fm/users/asshuku http://favstar.fm/users/asshuku, the Japanese kanji is being rendered like Chinese kanji. It's still readable, but it's just a little off-putting. I'm not native Japanese (I can read it, though), but the best example I can give of what this feels like for a Japanese person is that all of the text on the page has been highlighted and underlined. Readable, but annoying. I was playing around with it in Firebug, and it looks like a simple(?) fix would be to change the line: <html lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml xml:lang="en"> to: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml xml:lang="en"> or: <html lang="ja" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml xml:lang="ja"> You might also be interested in seeing Google's solution (http://www.google.com/search?q=google.co.jp http://www.google.com/search?q=google.co.jp), Slashdot's solution (http://www.slashdot.jp/ http://www.slashdot.jp/), or Wikipedia's solution (http://www.wikipedia.ja/ http://www.wikipedia.ja/).
- niyazpk 17y agoI would love to suggest a good business model, but I am afraid I will have to tell you that even twitter is not able to monetize its huge traffic. Forget monetization for now. Try to get acquired by somebody who think they can make use of your traffic.
- JshWright 17y agoWhy not a simple "Buy this on a t-shirt" link next to popular tweets? Given how easy it is to print stuff on shirts now, I'm sure someone has an API for resellers looking to put words on a t shirt.
- jbenz 17y agoZazzle does. In fact, they just launched a partnership with Urban Dictionary. Every single definition now has a little "Get this on a mug" link. http://www.zazzle.com/api http://www.zazzle.com/api
- josefresco 17y agoFark.com and CNN.com also do this. And it's an awesome idea. Geeks love snarky/one-liner tshirts. (hint: offer them in black and in XXL)
- trafficlight 17y agoI wish there were fewer black tshirts out there. I will buy any color but black.
- rrival 17y agoalso check out printfection.com
- niks 17y agofantastic idea! you gotta do the shirts. some of these lines are hilarious and most importantly original. p.s. y combinator should have a "forgot my password" button...or if they already do, make it a little more prominent
- clistctrl 17y agouse your traffic numbers as a proof of popularity and sell the idea to Twitter, then let them worry about it.
- davidw 17y agoSell it on to a 'greater fool'?:-)
- onedognight 17y agoAfter tweets have proved themselves, remove them from the site and hawk them to comedians. You'd just need one motivated buyer willing to spend a lot. Or better yet, use them yourself like William Shatner used Sarah Palin (giving back some to the original tweeters for an extra bonus).
- parterburn 17y agoThe layout is bit odd to show the content; I prefer a site like fav.tweets: http://www.sixteenseven.com/fav.tweets http://www.sixteenseven.com/fav.tweets