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Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

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Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you don't happen to run an adblocker?

I disabled uBlock, still can't see any ads. Weird. Also, uBlock tells me it only blocked two analytics scripts, no ads.

When they said that the next generation of advertising was going to be invisible I didn't quite know what to make of it, I guess this is it :) Good CPM and totally untraceable. I could get used to this.

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#52

> So I am thinking of revenue model based on ads. At its 'full' potential web application can draw a million visits per month (in 2-3 years may be). Please don't. Find a way to charge money for it, or accept that it's really not that valuable. Sad how everybody thinks merely hosting a website entitles them to revenue now.

Why the downvotes? Please don't downvote if you disagree with somebody's opinion. Start a meaningful conversation instead.

people would comment if they felt the comment stood on its own and was worthy of a counterarguement. However i feel the author lives in a bubble where ordinary people pay for online things.

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#54
-11$ this month for my blog. One article hit HN front page 2 weeks ago and I'm left with a small AWS bill, I had no ads :)

Since then, I tried to activate ads via disqus comments but their revenue program seems like you have to be selected first in order to earn money. What would you recommend to monetize a tech blog ? (at least to cover the hosting fees)

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#55
post #3

I can speak for the food blogging industry. This is my wife’s blog[1] A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4[2]. Where it gets interesting are the RPM numbers. If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks and become a preferred partner, you can rake up to $12-15in RPM [3]. Here’s more of multiple revenue sources for a successful blog [4…

> A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4 You're taking a risk here. By mentioning this, a good fraction of the 300K Hacker News daily uniques will visit your site as I did, and some may be gourmands. Excellent uncluttered presentation and mouth-watering photography by the way. On the other hand, you tipped off the largest gathering of highly motivated, entrepreneurial web deve…

If a lot of people copy him, probably he will make a lot more of money.

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#56
2 niche blogs: archimodels.info / archidrawings.info

Adsense revenue accounted to half of my monthly revenue ($100) 4 years ago. Nowadays, thanks to adblockers, it's only 10% of it and my monthly revenue is down to $50. Most of my revenue comes from a direct ad that adblockers can't detect.

Adsense is dead to small publishers.

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#57
For some years, I got a check from AdSense about once a year or so. Then with the adblocker wars, I didn't see a check for about two years. Their payment threshold is $100, so I was making something like $100 or so a year-ish. With getting more traffic, my numbers in recent months are looking more promising than that, but it is still looking like "not enough to be obligated to report it on my taxes." (In the US, that means under $600 annually, which I am not on track to be anywhere near. But I might get a second check before the year is up?)

I have always done better with getting cash from my audience than with ads. I used to have donate buttons on my sites, but at some point I switched to a tip jar and my take improved. Instructions how to make a pay pal tip jar can be found here (on my website):

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-...

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#58
post #3

I can speak for the food blogging industry. This is my wife’s blog[1] A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4[2]. Where it gets interesting are the RPM numbers. If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks and become a preferred partner, you can rake up to $12-15in RPM [3]. Here’s more of multiple revenue sources for a successful blog [4…

If i want to make a dish that needs exotic ingredients why cant i find a link to say.. Amazon or somewhere else?

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#59
post #50

I make about $600/mo pretty consistently with a typing game ( http://zty.pe ) - about 200k visits/mo. I once managed another project that had about 14m visits/mo and made a meager $3000. Bad target demographic.

I don't get it how do you guys get to million of visitors? actually - if you just tell me how to get to hundreds of unique returning visitors??!?!

You don't even know what site he's talking about.

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#60
post #22
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I don't run either anymore. The TV show site started off as a side project to train a new employee and ended up turning into a nice little business for awhile. When summer hit, the site plummeted in traffic & revenue and when the TV show seasons started again both Hulu and Netflix where not advertising the same anymore. That combined with the TV show line up was horrible so the traction just wasn't there anym…

Isn't Minecraft still popular? Why shut it down rather than let it sit there or sell it? I'd think with the increasing popularity of Netflix that'd still be popular as well.

It was a site about Minecraft mods which don't garner as much traffic as they once did. I did consider selling it at one point and even spoke with a web broker. The biggest concerns were trademark stuff especially now that Microsoft owns it. Letting a content site just "sit there" is the same thing as letting it die, which is what I pretty much did. You gotta keep on generating good content if you want to make $$ at it. In addition to that, the content you do generate needs to be able to garner enough traffic to make that $$.

Yes, Netflix is still popular but they were not pushing as many display ads as they once were when the site was doing its best. Plus the TV show line up sucked after that summer and nothing really was sticking. After taking into account the cost to hire and manage contract TV show writers, cost to advertise it, hosting, etc. the revenue it was making wasn't enough for it to be worthwhile. Especially considering our SaaS products and Advertising Agency were growing.

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