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Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

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Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#201

Post by boothead »

the_bear wrote: post #6

A couple of years ago I started a food blog with my mom (www.theyummylife.com). She does all the writing, and I do programming, design, and monetization. I spent a lot of time setting it up originally, but now it only takes a few hours each week of my time. Right now we're making $5000-6000/month after expenses, and I get 40% of that. My main business (a bootstrapped SaaS startup) generates more than that, but the pr…

Wow, that's a really great site. May I suggest working location into your amazon affiliate links. I'm sitting here in the UK looking at the refrigerator oatmeal recipe. If the links had said amazon.co.uk there's a much higher chance I would have bought the ingredients.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#202

Post by anon_builder »

highace wrote: post #90
anon_builder wrote: post #22

In august I made about $122,000 from display ads, mostly Adsense. 5-10% of that is spent on stuff like server space and freelance employees. I can imagine that this will not be taken seriously due to lack of details, but for anyone interested, I'm open to answering non-specific questions. Edit: I see 'from what' is also the question; I have a bunch of entertainment related sites.

Do you have any tips for squeezing the most out of adsense? Ad positioning, types, quantity, obtrusiveness?

Nothing that's not obvious.

Surely, there are methods to squeeze more revenue out of Adsense, or any display ad for that matter, but you'll risk being banned. So that's not worth it, especially when you get bigger.

I do recommend trying out different ad networks and having them compete with each other and with adsense in an ad server such as OpenX or DFP.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#203

Post by usmanity »

I wouldn't call it exactly passive but it's not really a focus right now.

I setup an etsy shop on which I put some posters I've made. http://www.etsy.com/shop/Posterboard

I actually have made -$1.40 b/c that's what it costed me to put up the posters. It's been up for about 2 weeks now.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#204

Post by alexkearns »

http://www.gambolio.com - $0 a month

http://www.casualgirlgamer.com - $200 a month

http://www.musicgames.co - $5 a month

http://www.tiki-toki.com - $5,000 a month

http://www.peopleplotr.com - $100 a month

I make extra licensing some of my software but that does not count as recurring income and can vary massively month to month.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#205

Post by sergeytubin »

It looks like $70-100 is average for a "good enough" android app without any promotion. My IOU app is about the same. Launching a web-site for it soon (same as app, with sync) to see how it affects. Not expecting much income from all of this, it's just fun.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#206

Post by anon_builder »

vidyesh wrote: post #200
anon_builder wrote: post #22

In august I made about $122,000 from display ads, mostly Adsense. 5-10% of that is spent on stuff like server space and freelance employees. I can imagine that this will not be taken seriously due to lack of details, but for anyone interested, I'm open to answering non-specific questions. Edit: I see 'from what' is also the question; I have a bunch of entertainment related sites.

- So is it niche marketing? - Are all your websites revolving around the same niche? - How many do you deploy for particular keyword and its long-tail keyword? - How many years/months you spent on keyword research? I mean when did you eventually ended up on this niche? - All your income is just Adsense? or Affiliate marketing too? - All yours websites are ranked #1 on SERP or few just somehwere on page #1? - Is your…

1) Depends on what you call a niche.

2) Yes.

3) How many what? Links?

4) I started out in the niche without knowing any SEO at all. Started building a product and built a lot of links for traffic. The authority and product I built then were the fundament for everything else. Not annoying my users, and building a strong site were always very important, as opposed to doing short-term black hat stuff while forgetting about content. I continually do keyword research; always keep my eyes open.

5) Not just Adsense, some other ad networks as well. All display ads though.

6) Depends. There are many keywords, some rank #1, some page #1, some don't rank at all. Depends on the quality of the content as well, I continually work on that.

7) For this project, yes. I've done PPC on other projects, but it doesn't seem to be profitable so far for this one.

8) Depends on what you call black hat. I've never spammed anything. Have bought a link here and there in the past, but I do have a huge amount of natural links as well. I guess that for industry standards, I'm pretty clean.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#207

Post by bdunn »

porter wrote: post #113
bdunn wrote: post #29

A little over $2700/mo with Planscope ( https://planscope.io ), my SaaS product that's been out since February. I'm averaging about a 8% growth rate month to month, so very excited about how things are going. * Bootstrapped * Raised my consulting rates to free up more time for products (= same amount of consulting income) * Most new customers come via referrals from existing users and organic traffic (via targeted bl…

This is a great success story. Would you mind sharing what your conversion rate is on the 14-day free trial? Have you experimented with asking for a credit card upfront? Also, was there ever a time you thought about giving up?

* About 20% of people who sign up for a trial end up paying.

* I don't have a CC paywall, but people I trust who convert much higher than I do recommend it, so I'll probably A/B test a paywall soon enough.

* Nope. There is no such thing as a singular product launch. If you launch, and no one shows up, figure out what went wrong and repeat. Persistence is everything.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#208

Post by anon_builder »

anon_publisher wrote: post #81
anon_builder wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None, it would be disastrous. I would probably work with other ad networks, but that wouldn't be cost effective to monetize my long tail of smaller sites. It would lead to a significant, if not huge, drop in revenue. You do get in personal contact with people at Google starting at some level of revenue though. So if it ever happened, I guess I would see it coming in some way.

google doesn't care, the company that I work for does around 15x your monthly revenue and was banned from adsense and getting in contact with google was impossible, as was finding a resolution (other than "re-apply in 6 months").

I assume you can't share what company that is?

Or the market you were operating in?

I can't imagine that a publisher doing 25 million of revenue per year couldn't get in touch with anyone at Google.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#209

Post by anon_builder »

continuations wrote: post #165
anon_builder wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None, it would be disastrous. I would probably work with other ad networks, but that wouldn't be cost effective to monetize my long tail of smaller sites. It would lead to a significant, if not huge, drop in revenue. You do get in personal contact with people at Google starting at some level of revenue though. So if it ever happened, I guess I would see it coming in some way.

Why wouldn't other ad networks be as effective as Google Adsense? What makes Adsense unique?

Their huge reach. There's no network with the same amount of advertisers and publishers. Especially with smaller sites, they're the easiest way to monetize, and sometimes to only way at all.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#210

Post by emilw »

Right, I've pondered a while if I should be posting this but here goes. Out of sheer boredom I created a adult orientated site, yes the whole nine-nsfw-yards stuff. It's free to use, no sign ups, no premium accounts, no ads, no pop-ups etc. Content is user generated and aggregated.

Aug 3rd - Sep 2nd 2012:

Visits: 81,045

Unique Visitors: 54,386

Pageviews: 3,189,136

Pages / Visit: 39.35

Avg. Visit Duration: 00:14:12

% New Visits: 63.69%

Are these numbers good enough to even start thinking about monetization?

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