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Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?

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Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?

#31

Post by rwhitman »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #28
rwhitman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did you start the site? At what point did you start realizing that Adsense was scaling well? Just really curious to hear your story.

I started the site with my friend and my girlfriend back in February while I was still in college. It took off. Like I said below, I only got direct advertisers in July, so it took awhile to grow. I was making about $1200 / month from Adsense in May/June, and some of the space has been sold to direct advertisers and I still make about $900 / month just from adsense, plus more from the advertisers. I'm still looking f…

Did most of the direct advertisers come to you, or did you actively look for them?

I've seen the link shared by friends before, is most of your traffic just organic/viral link sharing?

Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?

#33

Post by endlessvoid94 »

rwhitman wrote: post #31
endlessvoid94 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started the site with my friend and my girlfriend back in February while I was still in college. It took off. Like I said below, I only got direct advertisers in July, so it took awhile to grow. I was making about $1200 / month from Adsense in May/June, and some of the space has been sold to direct advertisers and I still make about $900 / month just from adsense, plus more from the advertisers. I'm still looking f…

Did most of the direct advertisers come to you, or did you actively look for them? I've seen the link shared by friends before, is most of your traffic just organic/viral link sharing?

I basically went and bought a High Times magazine and contacted every. single. company. that advertised in the issue I had.

I got a handful of responses, and one of them took a chance and gave me $X to try it out. I'm still waiting to hear if he wants to continue advertising.

The other one took longer to get, but I'm sending a significant amount of traffic their away and they're seeing revenue from the traffic, so it will likely continue.

RE: traffic -- My visitors are by FAR mostly coming directly. Which is a great position to be in. The other misc. Facebook was an early source, but not very high (no pun intended). Once I added "like" buttons to each story, facebook skyrocketed to the number 2 traffic referrer. Then there is traffic from StumbleUpon, twitter, a few blogs, and lastly organic search. But the search keywords are mostly just "that high", nothing outside the name of the site.

I'm sure there is a TON I could do to get more visitors. I would like to focus on it more and turn it into something that makes alot more money than it currently does. I know if I put some more time into it, it could make a ton of money, I just have to grow it, and that takes time.

Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?

#34

Post by patrickaljord »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #30
patrickaljord wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much traffic do you get monthly +/-?

It varies between 900k - 1.3M page views per month. Fluctuates between 90k and 110k visitors. Like I said, I haven't touched it in quite some time, as I'm focusing literally all of my energy on Djangy

wow, that's a very high pages/visit rate, congrats.

Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?

#35

Post by whatusername »

adw wrote: post #8

Everything makes money by selling something, whether directly or indirectly. There are something like five things you can sell via or over the Web: i) sell products which you buy or make yourself (ecommerce) ii) sell services which you generate (x-as-a-Service) iii) resell other people's products or services on commission (affiliate marketing) iv) sell your audience's attention (advertising) v) sell your audience's b…

http://xkcd.com/792/

Collect your audiences personal details and use them for nefarious ends while twirling your mustache and hiding out in a secret lair in a volcano. (Kinda like how Zuckerberg does it)

Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?

#36

Post by joelhaus »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #20
hariis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at which point were you able to get direct advertisers?

Built the site back in February and got my first direct advertiser in July. I've learned that these things unfortunately take time. Trust needs to be built, traffic needs to happen, and companies are sometimes understandably reluctant to shell out a bunch of money for some ad on a website they don't really know anything about. But if you can provide actual traffic for them, they'll pay for it.

Congrats on your success, but getting to >$1K/mo. in under five months seems incredibly fast, especially for something that requires such little maintenance.

  Can you expand a little on your expectations? Maybe provide some more context?
It seems like a lot of developers let their projects tread water unless they see extraordinary profits in extremely short time frames. Maybe there was a large up-front investment?

I'm guessing that there are a lot of these projects sitting around; does anyone know of a marketplace to partner or buy/sell these types of businesses? The ones I'm familiar with (flippa, sitepoint) don't generally cater to projects with existing cashflows.

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