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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?

#221

Post by udfalkso »

riskish wrote: post #135
udfalkso wrote: post #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.

how did you promote/market this initially?

Hmmm... It took quite a few years to build up decent traffic. At first I just asked friends to submit some questions (like http://isitnormal.com/story/-1/) and I seeded some myself. I posted the link on various forums and submitted it to "cool site of the day" type stuff. The concept has always resonated with people and I managed to get a few semi-decent sites to link to it early on.

New content started to slowly trickle in. Eventually search engines found the existing content. That search traffic led to more submissions. Rinse, repeat.

Most of the traffic comes from search now. Apparently people search for "is it normal that I ____" or "is it normal to ____" a lot. I didn't really anticipate this when I started the site in late 2004, but I guess I got a bit lucky with the name in that regard. However, if I had to do it all over again I'd probably pick a subject matter that's easier to monetize. iPods and cars instead of fetishes and phobias.

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

#222

Post by blantonl »

dpcan wrote: post #197
mleonhard wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your problems with backups? Does Rackspace Sites solve them?

For 1 - it's expensive how I have it setup. I have dedicated servers and am running full-server backups nightly with 5-day archives. It takes more dedicated machines to do this. I need to find another solution. With Rackspace Cloud Sites, they say they backup regularly for me, yes. They recommend MySQL backups on our own etc, but it's got me covered for the catastrophic situations I believe.

You might consider Amazon Web Services and their EBS snapshotting offerings. (I know.. I know...)

We run our Web infrastructure off an NFS cluster which has all storage on an EBS volume. We take snapshots from that.

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

#223

Post by jdvolz »

throwaway94818 wrote: post #151
WesleyJohnson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to know what you do for your normal paycheck (and how much it is) if an extra $40k a year isn't anything to get too excited about. Isn't that close to the median household income in the U.S.?

About $250K/year doing contract work. Declined a lot recently so probably closer to $175K this year.

What industry do you work in?

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

#224

Post by Gotperl »

malingo wrote: post #160

Basically zero for me. One question though is at what point do taxes become an issue, in terms of (in the US) the IRS becoming interested and ultimately how much they affect income?

You are required to report every dollar earned. Tax will be typical self employment taxes- your income tax rate + (approx 15% * the first 106K you make)

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

#225

Post by Coscorron »

I make about $900 on a social website that I wrote and admin by myself. The site helps local communities stay connected. A couple of years back revenue was around $1200 a month ive had the site for about 11 yrs and is currently on top 3 search results on google and yahoo.I'm adding several sister sites in the next few months just waiting for urls to become available.

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

#226

Post by guynamedloren »

bnenning wrote: post #186

Around $1000 a month from Android app sales: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.dozingcatsoftware.... . (After Google's cut, before taxes). A few weeks ago I applied the common HN advice and raised the price from $0.99 to $1.99, which so far has increased revenue by about 50%.

Not to knock your app... but really? Aren't there free apps that do the exact same thing? It's entirely possible that I am severely underestimating the mobile app market, but this just seems like something that nobody would pay for.

I think I need to get into mobile dev.

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

#227

Post by throwaway1074 »

richardw wrote: post #220
throwaway1074 wrote: post #209

I'm using a throwaway account here to protect my privacy. I'm currently making between 90k and 110K a month in revenue as a sole employee running a fairly large active Web community ( Our revenue sources breaks down as follows: * 40/50K/month in subscription revenue * 25K/month in adsense revenue * 4k/month in other ad revenue (Ebay, Amazon, Viglink etc) * 30K/month in license and royalty revenue As the sole employee…

Sounds absolutely perfect! Well done. Do you enjoy the community? Could you keep running it indefinitely?

For the most part I do. Large online communities have their challenges though with respects to the members. But I am an active participant on the platform with respect to it's content so I do enjoy the community.

I'm really not sure how to answer the question about running it indefinitely. I'm someone that doesn't like to sit still for long so I'd bet that I'll engineer a sale of this business someday in the next few years and move on to scratch another itch.

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

#230

Post by pkamb »

jdvolz wrote: post #218
pkamb wrote: post #162

$0 per month for my one-hand keyboard layout software, blah. Recently switched from a 'branded' domain to a exact-match domain, looking forward to seeing how that improves my results. Blog + regular content is next on the list. http://www.onehandkeyboard.org It's based on the same muscle memory as two-hand typing, so any two-hand typist can learn to type with one hand in minutes. Good for a programmer with a broken a…

As a programmer who tore my right distal radial biceps tendon and had surgery to repair it, I approve this message.

Exactly the kind of person I'm trying to reach! How did you manage while you were recovering? Did you search for any alternative layouts or guides?
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