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Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

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Re: Inside a viral website

#51

Post by gumby »

platz wrote: post #45
simias wrote: post #39

>Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the page. I’d read a fair amount about NFTs (both good and bad), and I was a mix of sceptical and curious. I thought this would be an interesting and weird opportunity to try it out myself. Added to this, it could be a fun meta-meme. I thought it would be fun to be the first meme website to sell itself as an NFT. I don't quite understand, what was sold here ex…

even with art, an NFT doesn't confer copyright rights, so you don't even own the art. > a way for the artist to generate artificial scarcity The art isn't stored on-chain, so it's not scarce either. All the NFT is is a pointer that has some text about who created it and what it points to. Not sure why why that pointer itself is valuable except as a status of "i am the only one that owns this unique pointer". Of cours…

It’s valuable because someone felt it was.

It’s the pet rock of 2021.

Re: Inside a viral website

#53

Post by sixQuarks »

Running a viral site by yourself is one of the most enjoyable feelings, like you have this big laboratory to play and test out things out with.

And it was quite easy to do back in the early days of the Internet. I ran one such site in the early 2000s, which attracted 30 million page views per month at its peak.

Like the author, I kept trying all kinds of things to monetize it, at the end affiliate programs and google Adsense worked the best.

Re: Inside a viral website

#54

Post by Jorge1o1 »

oefrha wrote: post #4

> These reports aren’t just limited to the products you recommend — if someone buys anything within a 24 hour period of clicking your link, you can see, and you get commission. Anyone else find this a pretty gross violation of privacy on Amazon’s part? Why should your unrelated purchases be disclosed to affiliates just because you clicked an affiliate link for whatever reason? Let’s say the affiliate website use acco…

Heh, if you think that's bad... there's a certain popular "#1 Money Saving Hack", coupon-clipping browser extension (wink wink) that sees everything you buy on practically every major e-commerce site even when you didn't use one of their coupon codes.

And then said browser extension, which promised to never ever sell your data to a third party, got bought out by PayPal for 4 billion USD.

Really makes you think.

Re: Inside a viral website

#55

Post by TeMPOraL »

One thing I don't understand about monetizing on the Internet.

I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment? Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or Stripe or whatever, collect the money and declare it as donations on the IRS form? Why try all these convoluted schemes, instead of giving a straightforward way for people to tip?

They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax.

Re: Inside a viral website

#56

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

camillomiller wrote: post #37

The main takeaway for me: > In my day job, we use Next.js for almost everything we build. It’s a framework built on top of React that just strips out almost all the complexity of building fairly complicated websites. Obviously, this wasn’t a complicated website, but I went with what I’m most familiar with. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail :D Edit to say that I think it's an amazing little wholesom…

Honest question for someone who is not a web developer: why not use Next.js?

Re: Inside a viral website

#57

Post by herbertl »

camillomiller wrote: post #37

The main takeaway for me: > In my day job, we use Next.js for almost everything we build. It’s a framework built on top of React that just strips out almost all the complexity of building fairly complicated websites. Obviously, this wasn’t a complicated website, but I went with what I’m most familiar with. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail :D Edit to say that I think it's an amazing little wholesom…

One part of me is a huge proponent of learning, but the other part of me is learning (lol) that a huge part of earning involves figuring out what you already know or have invested energy/time/cost into learning, and finding ways to create value for others from it. This was a nice way of doing that, and this posts squeezes the extra value from that experience by sharing insights on going viral.

In no way am I saying the only reason for learning is business—there's plenty of intrinsic value. But all that learning has to subsidized with something...

From a business perspective, there's a good chance there's more than a handful of earning opportunities right under each of our very noses every day. The key is to find the ones that align with our strengths, personalities, skillsets, etc...

Re: Inside a viral website

#58

Post by TeMPOraL »

Jorge1o1 wrote: post #54
oefrha wrote: post #4

> These reports aren’t just limited to the products you recommend — if someone buys anything within a 24 hour period of clicking your link, you can see, and you get commission. Anyone else find this a pretty gross violation of privacy on Amazon’s part? Why should your unrelated purchases be disclosed to affiliates just because you clicked an affiliate link for whatever reason? Let’s say the affiliate website use acco…

Heh, if you think that's bad... there's a certain popular "#1 Money Saving Hack", coupon-clipping browser extension (wink wink) that sees everything you buy on practically every major e-commerce site even when you didn't use one of their coupon codes. And then said browser extension, which promised to never ever sell your data to a third party, got bought out by PayPal for 4 billion USD. Really makes you think.

> And then said browser extension, which promised to never ever sell your data to a third party, got bought out by PayPal for 4 billion USD.

I guess selling the whole company owning the data isn't technically selling data to third parties...

Re: Inside a viral website

#60

Post by corobo »

SamBam wrote: post #31
runj__ wrote: post #19

So THATS why I was Rickrolled the other day...

I'm a little confused about this point. The website had a random timer, and was then opening a tab in the background? I thought that modern browsers required a direct user-interaction to cause a new tab to appear, such as a click. I thought this was how we got out of the pop-up hell of the 90s?

The page just refreshed. No new tabs.
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