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

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61–70 of 189 posts

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

#61
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??!?!

Build a community site and wait for 9 years. I'm not joking. The first 6 years saw maybe 2k visits/mo.

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

#62
post #44
post #6

It varies greatly based on type of content. The most I have made was $20k per month on a TV show review site. We had Netflix and Hulu advertising on in through Adsense for awhile and their ads were specific to the individual TV shows we were writing about. The RPM's were amazing. I also ran a Minecraft mods site for awhile with my son and at its top it made $9k/mo with about 130k unique visitor per month. More tech c…

> Games and entertainment content geared towards youth do well. Which is, I guess, because the youth is more susceptible to ads. :(

[deleted]

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

#63

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.

zty.pe is really fun - played it for an hour when it came up in another hacker news post. How did the costs of running the 14m vists/mo compare to http://zty.pe ? Different times, and probably different kind of site, but did the experience change the types of applications you tried to build?

I'm hosting ztype on the same server as all my other personal sites (http://phoboslab.org, http://impactjs.com and a few more) and pay 50€/mo for everything.

The project with the 14m visits/mo generated 700tb of traffic and required half a dozen servers. Cost was around $2000/mo with traffic being the most expensive part. (I complained about traffic costs with cloud hosters a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11301085)

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

#65
post #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)

if your blog is static data on S3, you can put cloudflare in front of it with the free plan and pay next to nothing due to the caching which they dont charge for

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

#66
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…

I think it's been proven this fear is overstated. Startup ideas are rarely stolen.

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

#67
post #6

It varies greatly based on type of content. The most I have made was $20k per month on a TV show review site. We had Netflix and Hulu advertising on in through Adsense for awhile and their ads were specific to the individual TV shows we were writing about. The RPM's were amazing. I also ran a Minecraft mods site for awhile with my son and at its top it made $9k/mo with about 130k unique visitor per month. More tech c…

[deleted]

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

#68
post #9
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…

Wow I had no idea food blogging was a profitable thing. Congrats to your wife. > If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks Isn't that impossible to get 100% filled? I recall reading a while back that getting even 40% was challenging which is why the ad quality online has gone down and they're more intrusive? Lots of interesting stuff on this thread, thanks for sharing.

Food blogging is an enormous market. The best foodies don't get money from Adsense though, it's through sponsorship/affiliate deals, books if they hit it big.

It's quite a stereotyped field though, and I would imagine it's a saturated market. Everyone wants to be like Deliciously Ella [1]. Don't even try unless you have a studio setup for the photography. Lots of food authors are pivoting towards more (usually female oriented) "lifestyle" blogs which happen to have recipes.

A lot of food blogs target healthy eating, or niche diets like keto/paleo. There are also tons of specialist food blogs covering bread, cakes, etc.

[1] https://deliciouslyella.com/

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

#69
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…

Very refreshing to see a food blog that's recipe oriented. I'll be trying some of those! When I see a picture of mouth watering food, I want the recipe, not paragraphs of fluff about what the author did that week.

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

#70

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 know if you were looking for feedback about the game, but the ease of losing progress quickly made me stop playing; because I was more likely to stop playing right after losing, you might want to make it take a longer time to advance levels, or to add multiple lives so that you don't lose all your progress suddenly.

But I don't know how that would affect my likeliness to see the ad. To improve that, maybe add more natural pause points to the game, so people can have more chances to click?

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