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Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

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Re: Inside a viral website

#131

Post by WaitWaitWha »

mrtksn wrote: post #104
TeMPOraL wrote: post #55

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…

>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. IMHO that is a fallacy. Although %0.01 looks like a really small number there's no reason for it for not being %0.001 or %0.000001. When people do napkin math , it's a common theme to say that "If we only capture %1 of the market we would be $$$rich$$$" and they…

>IMHO that is a fallacy.

Email spam works exactly this way. I think what you are pointing out correctly, is that the percentage might be incorrect; the principle is not.

Re: Inside a viral website

#132

Post by yummybear »

bkanber wrote: post #86
TeMPOraL wrote: post #55

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 po…

Make the v2 require membership?

Re: Inside a viral website

#133

Post by bemmu »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #98

It is fascinating how our online behavior deviates from our physical world behavior. This whole thread is about how asking for donations is a big fail online. Yet, there's no lack of street performers in most major metros. Whether that is people in superhero costumes on Hollywood Blvd, or street dancers in times square, they all seem to be doing fine off donations. There is something about the online "free duplicate…

Donations seem to work for livecasters though. Maybe the donation button needs to give some response like that from the creator to work?

Re: Inside a viral website

#134

Post by jasondigitized »

bkanber wrote: post #86
TeMPOraL wrote: post #55

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 po…

First 1000 words are free. After that, pay up Morse Coders!!!

Re: Inside a viral website

#135

Post by themanmaran »

dx034 wrote: post #2

Interestingly, according to [1] there were only ~11k visitors from Hackernews for a post on the front page that had ~1k comments. I would've estimated the visitor/comment ratio to be much, much higher. [1] https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_sour...

I had a HN frontpage post a couple months ago.

The results:

- 250 upvotes

- 101 comments

- 6,675 site views (over the 1.5 days it was frontpage)

Re: Inside a viral website

#136

Post by jrochkind1 »

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…

Yes, NFT's are one of the weirdest blockchain related scams/pyramid schemes yet.

Re: Inside a viral website

#137

Post by DoreenMichele »

dx034 wrote: post #2

Interestingly, according to [1] there were only ~11k visitors from Hackernews for a post on the front page that had ~1k comments. I would've estimated the visitor/comment ratio to be much, much higher. [1] https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_sour...

Every post is different.

Viral or click bait stuff on "hot" topics can foster a lot of insubstantive and often fighty comments. That's a known phenomenon on the site.

Re: Inside a viral website

#138

Post by mrtksn »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #131
mrtksn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. IMHO that is a fallacy. Although %0.01 looks like a really small number there's no reason for it for not being %0.001 or %0.000001. When people do napkin math , it's a common theme to say that "If we only capture %1 of the market we would be $$$rich$$$" and they…

>IMHO that is a fallacy. Email spam works exactly this way. I think what you are pointing out correctly, is that the percentage might be incorrect; the principle is not.

I don’t think that spam is a fair comparison. Spammers send out offer for stuff that people want. It’s completely different than first giving out what people want and then asking for a gratitude payment.

Spam’s success rate would be dictated by the percentage of the people who want the product in the general population after passing through the spam delivery funnel.

With the donations it’s completely different mechanism.

Nevertheless, the fallacy is that small looking number of market share is the smallest possible market share.

Re: Inside a viral website

#139

Post by cl0ckt0wer »

bkanber wrote: post #86
TeMPOraL wrote: post #55

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 po…

Do you show the user how much time they've used? That may motivate them to be more "generous".

Re: Inside a viral website

#140

Post by sjs382 »

bkanber wrote: post #86
TeMPOraL wrote: post #55

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 po…

Another datapoint:

Three years ago, I built an offline/online paper wallet generator[0] for what was one of the top cryptocurrencies by market cap (Stellar Lumens - XLM). I included a donation address in the footer of the page.

I've received 9 donations in those three years[1], amounting to about 12 XLM (currently $4.87). While not much, I get a kick out of the idea that 9 people liked it enough to donate.

Note, my costs are negligible and I've never received a single feature request or had to do any maintenance. The code is hosted at GitHub Pages (free) with Cloudflare (free) in front of it. The only cost to me is the domain name.

[0] https://stellarpaperwallet.com

[1] Cloudflare only gives me analytics for the last month but last month it had 1,348 unique visitors.

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