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Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

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Re: Inside a viral website

#201

Post by zepearl »

ryantgtg wrote: post #155
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…

Have you tried Patreon? I had the same experience with a donation button. But a Patreon button magically gave us steady money to support infrastructure.

Yeah, as a (small/tiny) donator for 3 projects so far I personally liked Patreon - neat, simple, it works.

There are 3 other projects to which I'd like as well to donate something but they're all using different services ( https://donorbox.org , https://ko-fi.com , https://liberapay.com ) => I don't want to lose control over my donations and creating accounts there as well would have that effect on me.

Therefore, I think that somebody that would like to receive donations should try make multiple options available - hoping for the opposite (that whoever donates will use the specific service that you chose) won't work.

Re: Inside a viral website

#202

Post by dopeboy »

l00sed wrote: post #157

I'd love if someone could point me in the direction of WHY this Next.js setup "just works". This was a great article, and the author described the sensation of getting traffic very well. I've been on the other side of the coin where my apache server crashed or 50* error'd out. It would be interesting to know more about what makes this stack or this server architecture "just work" under the hug of death.

I'm very new to it and one thing I really like about building in it is that there is no react-router. It bakes in routing and I've found that to be such a more pleasant experience than chasing around how react-router has changed.

Re: Inside a viral website

#205

Post by zeropoint46 »

kbenson wrote: post #190
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…

So, a couple months ago, I started using a site for a game I play that provides maps, info on items in the game, current prices for the global market that players can trade on, etc. You can link it to your Patreon account, and if you're a patron for $5/mo, the site gives you historical data on the market, and a few other useful features for the game. There's also a Discord for updates, features requests, general dev…

what game?

Re: Inside a viral website

#206

Post by tjs8rj »

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.

The fallacy comes from forgetting these are people. “Surely theres 1 in 10,000 who want this” is wishful thinking, “There exists a type of person who wants this, and I can point to them, but they happen to be a small segment of the population - 1 in 10,000” is actionable and valid.

There’s nearly 8,000,000,000 humans, so there’s a ton of variety that one can’t even imagine, but probably none of them want to eat a bar of soap for breakfast each day even if you think there must be some rare 1 in 1,000,000 out there.

Putting 1 in BIG NUMBER is just a way we abstract away hard and intimidating questions.

Re: Inside a viral website

#207

Post by worik »

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…

"Asking for donations doesn't work"

Depends. I have paid for things I could have gotten for free, and raised money for political organisations (not in the USA, so we could not sell laws the way the Americans do).

The best way to get money is to ask. There is a lot of research into the best ways to ask, and what gives best results.

But just asking thoughtlessly (not accusing you, no idea how you asked) does not work

Re: Inside a viral website

#208

Post by FalconSensei »

iamacyborg wrote: post #129
VBprogrammer wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the article he mentioned this; he was worried about the hosting costs. Thankfully his host got a laugh out of it and donated the hosting cost and he has in turn donated any proceeds.

Right, but if you're incurring significant hosting costs for a static site in 2021 then you're doing something wrong.

unless you have images?

Re: Inside a viral website

#209

Post by laverya »

zepearl wrote: post #197
dayvid wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me think of Wikipedia who have probably A/B tested donation requests to death and have them take up half the page.

Wikipedia is in my opinion unluckily a complex example because the donations are actually for Wikimedia. In my case I donated only once to them and I understood only later that (apparently?) most of the $ isn't being used for Wikipedia, therefore as I'm not interested in their other projects I never donated anything anymore to them - they can make that banner as big&flashy as they want but the fact remains that I don…

Not to mention WP:CANCER [0], though it's less of an exponential curve today than 5 years ago.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Re: Inside a viral website

#210

Post by ducharmdev »

paxys wrote: post #187
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…

Yup, people are just wired to think of physical vs digital goods or experiences very differently. Cliche comparison by now, but I know so many people who will spend $4 on a Starbucks latte every day, but the thought of spending $4 a month on a web app that they use for hours every day is unimaginable.

I'd argue that people have been taught to expect it to be free. When fundamental services like search, email, chat, etc. are provided to consumers for free, why shouldn't other services be free too?

Of course we know these services aren't really free; Google and Facebook still run their services on physical servers that have hosting costs. But by making their apps free and finding alternative revenue streams (i.e. selling data), they can set norms that harm competitors with less capital while making it easier to adopt new users (and collect more data).

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