Ask HN: I made $1.01 yesterday. What next?

On Monday night I couldn't sleep. I had a domain name that I'd bought (http://fstr.net) that wasn't getting approved by the parking provider.

It was just sitting there, doing nothing and I couldn't stand it. So I thought why not put some web games on it?

So I coded... and coded ... and coded ... and by 3AM I had a page, with a database that linked up a bunch of games that were declared "embeddable" by their owner (addictinggames.com).

Tuesday, it made $0.50 on Adsense. Yesterday $1.01.

Now if only I were able to scale that up by about 80 times (using only part time labor) and I'd be able to 'take the pay cut' so I could switch into scaling it up by about 200 times for a great big raise!

Reading HN has really opened my eyes to the fact that the internet is made by people. It doesn't have to be created by corporations - but it's something that anyone can do. Holy Crap! Even me.

I just checked my profile and I've been a Hacker News reader for 94 days. With the income I've earned from this project, that's an income of over a penny a day so far... Let's see if I can ramp that up?

I want to put some time into improving the technology. Initially I was loading a random list of about 1000 games - but I've changed that to show the games sorted by order or user rank.

I've also got game tag and category data - so I can add navigation, maybe a fun, self updating 'active search' type of thing (I'm already loading the games via ajax)

I'd like to pull from other games sources - many of the big games sites allow you to host their games (since they get the linkback on the flash load screen)

Some even have revenue sharing on the ads inside the game as well.

The page desperately needs to be optimized in terms of adsense placement. I'm getting a 1.5% CTR and I've got friends who have shown me placements that they earn 30% off of. He tells me he's got optimizations that earn him 70% CTR.

I'd also like to redesign (again) so it looks a little more polished and professional. So far it's really just a ~8 hour hack job and ugly.

But earning a dollar on the first day? That's a bit encouraging. I'd love to make a real, sustainable 'gig' out of running a games site (or any site for that matter) ...

I really think HackerNews might be the type of place that has the advice I need (and might be able to warn me off of some of the pitfalls I might run into).

Anything you can tell me would be greatly appreciated (a hell of a lot cheaper than an MBA program ;).

This isnt answering your question but i've got a quick suggestion for you dev wise.

Cache those images on your front page, then stitch them together into a big sprite and then use CSS to display the specific image from the sprite. It'll greatly decrease the load time on that page.

Ref: http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/

Obligatory clickable:

http://fstr.net

Congrats on the site and getting started on a project.

How are you driving visitors to the site currently?

Consider monetizing with game related affiliate programs. There are lots of toolbars, gaming sites that pay $1-$3 CPAs which will improve your eCPM.