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Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

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Re: Inside a viral website

#81
post #78
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would pay $1 for getting a chuckle out of a meme? Also 50 million views is not 50 million visitors. If he had a normal ad monetization channel in place, he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM and walked away with at least $5k from his 15 minutes of fame. The problem is that learning as you go makes it a little too late to monetize the peak. There are companies whose entire business…

> he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM Uh, not in my experience. I haven't tried to monetize a site like this, but I would expect a CPM around 1 cent. Still, times 50 million, it isn't nothing.

> I would expect a CPM around 1 cent. Still, times 50 million, it isn't nothing.

CPM is cost per mille, AKA cost per thousand impressions. Revenue from 50,000,000 impressions would be CPM * 50,000.

Re: Inside a viral website

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Check out any privacy policy that says they will never share or sell your data; the two boilerplate exceptions are law enforcement and transfering ownership of the parent entity. Two pretty big loopholes.

Re: Inside a viral website

#83
post #78
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would pay $1 for getting a chuckle out of a meme? Also 50 million views is not 50 million visitors. If he had a normal ad monetization channel in place, he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM and walked away with at least $5k from his 15 minutes of fame. The problem is that learning as you go makes it a little too late to monetize the peak. There are companies whose entire business…

> he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM Uh, not in my experience. I haven't tried to monetize a site like this, but I would expect a CPM around 1 cent. Still, times 50 million, it isn't nothing.

It's tough as an individual that's just dipping their toes into the water, but if you have some experience, then you typically have an optimized setup with partners in place, etc.

Re: Inside a viral website

#84

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 an…

> Couldn't they just [...]

:D

Re: Inside a viral website

#85
post #70
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…

That's why I still think NFTs are scam

How is it a scam if you get exactly what you paid for?

Re: Inside a viral website

#86

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 an…

For the last 10 years or so I've been running a free-to-use Morse Code online radio thing. It has cost me about $1000 to host so far, and has a couple of hundred DAUs.

The users are not shy about feature requests, and they're not shy about complaining that I haven't implemented their feature requests.

So I made a pledge to the userbase that if they collectively donate $1000 to the site, I'll start working on v2.

I posted that pledge to the site a year ago. Total donations: $80.

There are a couple of hundred people who use the site for hours per day and post on the forums that they love it, but haven't donated a fiver.

Asking for donations doesn't work.

Re: Inside a viral website

#87

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…

Your comment doesn't sound harsh, it sounds stupid :)

Re: Inside a viral website

#88
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…

It's like a signed baseball card, where it is signed by whoever is selling the NFT. The cardboard and ink is worthless, but add the signature and you have something.

When the signer matches the creator (e.g. beeple selling NFTs of his art, this guy selling an NFT of his site), the interesting part isn't really the thing, but the signature.

Re: Inside a viral website

#89
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would, particularly if the blurb was very honest (or very creative). I have no trouble throwing someone even a one-time $5 if the website is funny enough.

How often do you do this per month? How many webpages do you read per month? Now divide one by the other.

Zero times. They never have.

When people give the "oh yeah I'd be generous" spiel, they're lying. Indeed, they're usually the cheapest of all (in the same way that the people who tell you how generous they are with tips are usually the ones who stiff wait staff).

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