Are we talking about Google Ads or accepting my own ads directly from vendors?
At what traffic rate, will I be in a position to get my own ads from vendors?
This will be a niche website.
Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?
#12When you say "website", is it content-driven or a web application/tool? Either way, ads would be a good (only?) option.
If it's content-driven, you can do premium content stuff (like eBooks, downloadables, etc.)
And when you say "enough money," how much are we talking about? It's all relative: the more traffic you get, the more money you get. I would focus on growing your community and audience before even thinking about monetization. Have that behind your head, of course, but you're not going to make money if you don't have traffic or a community. You're not going to make anything significant if your product sucks. Focus on the product first, the money will come eventually. It's an investment of time and a bit of money (web hosting on a VPS is like $20 a month and you just scale when you need to).
Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?
#13Everything 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…
vi) be a loss-leader for something else.
In the case of a personal websites, that something else might your career, raising your profile to potential employers/contracting clients.
It's not strictly making money itself, but in the long run, it might have a very decent ROI.
Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?
#14I run ThatHigh.com and it pays my rent in SF.
I started out with Adsense and it scales pretty well. I now have two direct advertisers paying me monthly.
So basically, it's ad-driven. And that model can definitely work.
Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?
#15Everything 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…
vi) be a loss-leader for something else. In the case of a personal websites, that something else might your career, raising your profile to potential employers/contracting clients. It's not strictly making money itself, but in the long run, it might have a very decent ROI.
Sure, but in that case, the website is a marketing campaign for something else, not a product. (We're not disagreeing, really, it just depends on how you're setting the scope.)
Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?
#16Everything 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…
This will be a niche website which falls into the 'iv) sell your audience's attention (advertising)' category.
Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?
#17Sell site merchandise, if applicable. I don't mean using Cafe press, I mean do a survey of your viewers and ask if they'd be interested, take the number of "yes" votes and halve that, and if you've got more than, say, 50, do a run of tshirts based on the sizes in the survey you put out. Make sure you have a quality design, make sure the tshirt printer shows you a proof before you give the go on the large batch, then put it on your credit card, and sell the shirts. A one color print job on a single side of a decent shirt will run you $5-7 USD, and you can sell them for $15-$30, depending on a number of factors.
Before affiliating with eBay and Amazon, I would do a fund drive every couple of years. You know, "Hey, we've got 80,000 monthly unique viewers, if every one of you pitched in a quarter, I'll never bug you about cash again." Asking for donations once every two years is much more effective than leaving up a 'donate' paypal button, in my experience.
eBay and Amazon have easy to use APIs that can generate affiliate links which can bring income. You can either build out a merch page a la http://theninhotline.net/features/merch/ or if you're writing about stuff that might have related reading (or in my case, music) link to stuff on Amazon within your content every now and then.
Having said that, don't make a post just so you can link to Amazon. Don't let your affiliation drive your content. But if you think linking to a book might genuinely be interesting to your audience, do it, and use an affiliate link.
I look at ads as a last resort, but that's because I'm odd. I've only rarely put ads on my site, and only on a direct-sale kind of thing. MTV contacted me asking me if I could link to something of theirs, I wrote back and asked for what I thought was a reasonable price (based off what I made in Amazon and eBay) and they agreed to pay for the link, which I had creative control over, and which featured in my sidebar for a month.
Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?
#18I run ThatHigh.com and it pays my rent in SF. I started out with Adsense and it scales pretty well. I now have two direct advertisers paying me monthly. So basically, it's ad-driven. And that model can definitely work.
at which point were you able to get direct advertisers?
Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?
#19Everything 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…
vi) be a loss-leader for something else. In the case of a personal websites, that something else might your career, raising your profile to potential employers/contracting clients. It's not strictly making money itself, but in the long run, it might have a very decent ROI.
This is going to be my first app so raising my profile will also be very rewarding.
Re: Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money?
#20I run ThatHigh.com and it pays my rent in SF. I started out with Adsense and it scales pretty well. I now have two direct advertisers paying me monthly. So basically, it's ad-driven. And that model can definitely work.
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.