Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 305 posts

Re: Inside a viral website

#231

Post by dragonwriter »

camillomiller wrote: post #221
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an amateur dev and since I more or less learned Vue and the Quasar framework, every web site looks like a Vue&Quasar nail to me. It works - i can pop out sites that work in a mall amount of time. They will never be istheshipstillstuck.com-famous or cnn.com-loaded, or never be used in some countries where loading 10 MB of JS is a problem. they are used by me, on my 1000/400 Mbps connection, or by my children on a…

This is the point. Why do you all think just in damn frameworks!? There’s a thing called HTML5+CSS+JS. You could have built that static page in no time with that, that’s my surprisingly misunderstood point here.

> There’s a thing called HTML5+CSS+JS. You could have built that static page

The web platform itself is a framework that consumes static HTML and CSS and calls into your JS. Preferring a higher-level framework for web apps when that is available is no different than preferring a higher level language even though ASM is available for local apps.

Re: Inside a viral website

#232

Post by kbenson »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #223
kbenson wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand your point, but this is just a plain old subscription.

Yes. It's a plain old subscription in the same way that using a card linked to your iPhone or Android phone to pay for a subscription through their app stores is a plain old subscription.

That is, it comes with lots of advantages through being part of an ecosystem that people may already be part of or at least have some trust in because it is well known. Additionally it's already associated with helping people and projects in a way that may not be purely transactional, which fits how some people feel about their projects (thus the option to donate as discussed here).

Just because two models can be boiled down to essentially the same thing doesn't always mean they will perform equally as well. Sometimes the small distinctions and details are very important.

Re: Inside a viral website

#233

Post by T-hawk »

dillondoyle wrote: post #149
twox2 wrote: 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…

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

Reddit gold makes tons of sense. People can pay money to amplify the opinions they want amplified. Reddit actually monetized internet arguing.

Re: Inside a viral website

#234

Post by giantrobot »

LockAndLol wrote: post #230
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…

Don't call them donations. Look at what reddit did: people can "give gold" to people for comments that they think were great. All it does is add some icon to a comment and put the person in a "gold club". In games, people will buy so many visual improvements that add nothing but glam to their character. Discord does... something, I can't remember what exactly, with their "turbo" and IIRC it costs discord cents, but t…

Back in the stone ages Slashdot gave subscribers a comment bonus and an indication the user was a subscriber. An icon in the forums or some small benefit for "subscribing" goes a long way to get people to fork over a few dollars for something.

Re: Inside a viral website

#235

Post by JeremyNT »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #127
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…

You are correct that asking for donations doesn't work. If you think of it as donations and you talk about it like donations, people view you as a "charity case" begging for money. Good luck with that. If you position it as tips and payment for the value you deliver, you can turn it into money. It's not easy, it's not consistent and it's probably not a way to get rich quick. But there are people who are successfully…

Most successful Patreon projects do provide extra value to the people who subscribe, though.

In this case you might decide to provide early access to new features for subscribers, for example.

Re: Inside a viral website

#236

Post by tehjoker »

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…

Maybe your work would be better positioned for a grant of some kind. Is there a membership organization that many radio people belong to and pay dues? They'd possibly have the funds to make improvements to the ecosystem.

Re: Inside a viral website

#237

Post by rchaud »

iamacyborg wrote: post #120
twox2 wrote: 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…

> Who would pay $1 for getting a chuckle out of a meme? That sort of feels like the core issue. Why even try to monetise a page like this?

Hosting costs money. Although for someone who's go-to stack for a meme website is NextJS + React could probably afford to fork over $70 for 15 minutes of Internet fame.

Re: Inside a viral website

#238

Post by frakkingcylons »

Regarding the Amazon affiliate marketing bit: I am surprised he didn’t make at least an order of magnitude more money from the clicks.

I ran a site that was popular on a niche subreddit in 2013-2014 which had Amazon affiliate links. On the very first day when the site was the top post, the resulting affiliate commissions were over $500. And most of them were not for products that were linked to on the site. The lifetime commissions earned was about $11K from a total of maybe 100K unique visitors. The biggest contributor to the commissions were unrelated expensive purchases that visitors made later on Amazon. I’m curious if the affiliate program changed in the 8 years since.

Re: Inside a viral website

#239

Post by rchaud »

T-hawk wrote: post #233
dillondoyle wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Reddit gold makes tons of sense. People can pay money to amplify the opinions they want amplified. Reddit actually monetized internet arguing.

> Reddit actually monetized internet arguing.

I never thought about it like this. I always just thought of Reddit Gold as just another weird Internet quirk I will never understand.

I kind of wonder if NFTs for artwork will become the same thing. Like amplifying comments, maybe high NFT prices will be a way to amplify one artist over another in what is a very crowded marketplace.

Re: Inside a viral website

#240

Post by DoreenMichele »

JeremyNT wrote: post #235
DoreenMichele wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct that asking for donations doesn't work. If you think of it as donations and you talk about it like donations, people view you as a "charity case" begging for money. Good luck with that. If you position it as tips and payment for the value you deliver, you can turn it into money. It's not easy, it's not consistent and it's probably not a way to get rich quick. But there are people who are successfully…

Most successful Patreon projects do provide extra value to the people who subscribe, though. In this case you might decide to provide early access to new features for subscribers, for example.

This is true.

But some of them just seem to very creatively thank you for your support. I recall reading one that waxed eloquent about how supporting them at the one dollar level would buy you a guilt-free conscience with regards to consuming their content or something like that.

Post reply on HN