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Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

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Re: Inside a viral website

#141

Post by soared »

kevinstubbs wrote: post #18
artembugara wrote: post #6

Neat. Could anyone give me some ideas how else the author could monetize this without normal ads? Also, what would be the gain if he did normal ads?

Hey, I run an ad tech company. Our targets for US traffic are about $10 USD per thousand page views. This is multiples more than what you would get from AdSense, plus we help with strategy and integration. Besides that, the author did mention several things he tried besides ad monetization. I think the most effective thing would have been to either find an opportunistic brand that wants to advertise here (like a mari…

$10 rpm, lol what do you only accept finance and law blogs?

Re: Inside a viral website

#143

Post by whimsicalism »

dmos62 wrote: post #103
bkanber wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not to criticize you in any way, but I've found that asking me for financial support works in some cases and those are because I felt the "humanness" of the creator. I remember this author that put up a video of her unboxing first batch of her newly released book (and being excited about it). The person went from a name on a webpage or face in a video to a human being immediately (in my mind). I don't really have the…

I bet you that this is a space where there is a reverse gender pay gap.

Re: Inside a viral website

#144

Post by SamBam »

LordAtlas wrote: post #111
SamBam wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one doubts that it's useful for the people standing to make money off of this. I think the question was whether it was an invasion of the reader's privacy, who probably don't realize that the blog owner can now track their buying habits.

Only in the aggregate. The site owner doesn't know who purchased what. Only Amazon (obviously) knows. The site owner only sees that 35 people bought book X while 24 people bought book Y.

Anonymous data can easily become identifiable when it's small enough, as GP was saying.

If someone runs a tiny blog that they attempt to monetize with affiliate links, and one of their only readers at the moment is their mother, I don't think they'd be happy seeing that one of their readers purchased a sex toy.

Re: Inside a viral website

#145

Post by elevaet »

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…

Maybe it's not the "free duplicate copy" making the value disappear, but that the social context makes us feel anonymous and less obliged to reciprocate on the web.

We're a social species that evolved in tribes. Street performers probably do a better job of stimulating that sense of tribe than abstract interactions on a web page do.

Re: Inside a viral website

#146

Post by lotsofpulp »

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…

>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.

All websites are not comparable to Times Square or Hollywood Blvd, in terms of how much attention they get. You also don't see performers in 99.99% of cities, even in other areas of the same city like NYC and LA.

Re: Inside a viral website

#147

Post by ducttapelogic »

skrebbel wrote: post #116
dmos62 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to criticize you in any way, but I've found that asking me for financial support works in some cases and those are because I felt the "humanness" of the creator. I remember this author that put up a video of her unboxing first batch of her newly released book (and being excited about it). The person went from a name on a webpage or face in a video to a human being immediately (in my mind). I don't really have the…

That's all true but it means that you need to market your person, become an "internet personality" just to collect donations on something technical that you built It works, true, eg Andrew Kelley is funding his Zig work that way and it's pretty amazing to see him ace it. But damn you gotta be a particular kind of person to not get extremely stressed out about that prospect.

Ah, you've beet me to it skrebbel. :) I actually wanted to write something like this. It's really hard to be what you are (in my case - a very introverted and private person), give something valuable to the world and actually live from that. That would be a beautiful life, really.

p.s. Not saying there are no people who didn't manage to pull it off, but I'm pretty sure those people are exceptions rather than the rule.

Re: Inside a viral website

#148

Post by paulpauper »

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…

I think he was hoping for a Beeple-like windfall such as from Elon Musk or an early crypto adopter...a huge right-tail in terms of potential profit. No dice though.

Re: Inside a viral website

#149

Post by dillondoyle »

twox2 wrote: post #63
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…

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…

Reddit gold seems to fit here. It makes no sense to me but it seems to be working. I find it funny the threads complaining about Reddit's recent horrible hiring an mod decisions all had TONS of gold lol

Re: Inside a viral website

#150

Post by jowsie »

iamacyborg wrote: post #119
thrashh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve run a few donation schemes and those things don’t do much. People just don’t donate. Subscriptions are the best, but obv that won’t work for a meme page.

So how does Wikipedia manage to get donations? Is it just a scale problem where you needs hundreds of millions of pageviews a day to generate any meaningful number of donations?

Wikipedia has a lot more utility than a website about a current event you're gonna visit 2 or 3 times before the issue is resolved. It's a lot easier to justify that donation.
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