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Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

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Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#41

6k-8k a month through small-time consulting. I've got one big customer, and two smaller ones. Good work, but it doesn't scale well.

I know it's recurring, but I thought the OP was asking about things that "sell themselves", that is, no effort on your part to make an extra unit of money. Could be wrong though.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#42
I was earning approximately $10-15k annually from affiliate marketing from 2002-2006 (formerly giftsforaguy.com), but I didn't spend the time I needed to stay up-to-date with my search rankings.

When I tried to start over with a more general gift affiliate site in 2009, I found that the game had changed so much that it would likely take over a year to get back to the earlier level using organic SEO.

So I've put it on hold, hoping to relaunch using social discovery for customer acquisition.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#43
post #37

I started a ROM site when I was 14, it eventually got really popular and thus got quite a few youtube videos and good search engine rankings. These days the ROMs have been long removed so traffic has obviously fallen, however due to the links and still decent search engine rankings it gets roughly 100k page views per day. End result is that the ads give me around $2k to $3k a month. Pretty happy with that since I no…

Wow. Why not move the domain to an anonymous registrar (or 301 all the traffic to a new one), host the site on offshore bulletproof hosting, and put the roms back? That's a huge chunk of change you're probably missing out on.

Too be honest because it felt wrong to run such a site and know you were a huge part of the piracy problem. But yes, I basically decided that I didn't want $20,000 a month. At the height of its time it served 2 million page views a day!

These days I'm just thankful for everything it taught me, I can safely say that my programming skill comes from this one website and the trial by fire that is to scale a website to such high traffic and bandwidth usage.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#45

I set up a web dev blog in 2003, at ILoveJackDaniels.com, and after a few months of rubbish blogging starting doing free cheat sheets to download. At its peak, from AdSense and text link ads, it made about $1200 per month. I had to move domain (trademark heat), and moved to AddedBytes.com. Lost lots of traffic and links, unfortunately. Ad revenue dropped over time (around $100 at its lowest), and I recently ditched t…

Dude. Your cheat sheets were amazing back in the day (2004) when I was first getting into LAMP. The HTML entities sheet and CSS sheet were lifesavers. I had them all printed out and hanged up on the wall above my monitor.

Do you have a Paypal donate button/email? :)

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#47

I started a ROM site when I was 14, it eventually got really popular and thus got quite a few youtube videos and good search engine rankings. These days the ROMs have been long removed so traffic has obviously fallen, however due to the links and still decent search engine rankings it gets roughly 100k page views per day. End result is that the ads give me around $2k to $3k a month. Pretty happy with that since I no…

Are you using Google Adsense?

I did in the early days, but they eventually banned me. (still paid what they owed me, though)

I hear from a friend still doing this that adsense is pretty bad these days. More graphic ads convert better and pay more. So ad agencies like Matomy(Xtend), CPX (basically any yieldmanager platform) performs a bit better. Of course, if you can get into platforms such as Tribal fusion then you'll make a killing as they have really high paying ads.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#48

6k-8k a month through small-time consulting. I've got one big customer, and two smaller ones. Good work, but it doesn't scale well.

I'm in the same boat, it's a comfortable way of life but I always struggle with how to bring it to the next level.

Make a product.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#49
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Why not move the domain to an anonymous registrar (or 301 all the traffic to a new one), host the site on offshore bulletproof hosting, and put the roms back? That's a huge chunk of change you're probably missing out on.

Too be honest because it felt wrong to run such a site and know you were a huge part of the piracy problem. But yes, I basically decided that I didn't want $20,000 a month. At the height of its time it served 2 million page views a day! These days I'm just thankful for everything it taught me, I can safely say that my programming skill comes from this one website and the trial by fire that is to scale a website to su…

Yeah, the first time you take a site from nothing to large scale is awesome. :)

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#50
Roughly $1,000 a month in revenue from http://isitnormal.com. Expenses add up to around $300 a month for hosting on linode and paid moderators. Given traffic levels, I feel I should be able to do better than this somehow. Still searching for the best way to monetize all the super-weird (but interesting!) UGC content.
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