Inside a viral website • Hacker News Board

Re: Inside a viral website

#241

Post by LeonB » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

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…

This was my experience too, with a useful online page I built. People loved it but wouldn’t donate to help it.

Someone suggested I productise it but I thought, based on the donations, that it wouldn’t have many purchasers. But they were right: it earned orders of magnitude more when some features required a one time payment to be unlocked, versus donation.

Re: Inside a viral website

#242

Post by rchaud » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

colpabar wrote: post #77

TeMPOraL wrote: post #72

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.

Unfortunately you are in the extreme minority. I was watching a stream on youtube that has an optional patreon subscription and people were complaining that $0.99 per MONTH was too much because the stream was too quiet for a bit. Paying directly for things you like on the internet doesn't seem like a big deal to us here on HN, but the overwhelming majority of people will never even consider it. Everything else is fre…

IMO the pricing itself signals that the product isn't worth paying for. $0.99 per month? For what I'm sure includes hours of streaming? It's close enough to $0 that I don't even think about whether an additional buck is going to make a difference.

Re: Inside a viral website

#243

Post by akiselev » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

mustacheemperor wrote: post #186

skeeter2020 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This led me to look up Honey's own privacy policy and I do not see such a disclaimer regarding change of ownership, in fact it specifically references what they can share with PayPal. [0] >We know how important your personal data is to you, so we will never sell it. We'll only share it with your consent or in ways you'd expect (as we explain here). That means we will share your data if needed to complete your purchas…

That is the privacy policy that users agree to if they joined post acquisition (probably because Paypal doesn't expect to sell it at this time), which is different than the policy that users agreed to when they joined pre-acquisition. They may have been forced to accept the new policy post acquisition anyway.

I think the weasel is this nibble here:

> but only for purposes allowed by this Privacy Policy;

The privacy policy is between the user and Honey, not the user and PayPal, which implies they are still legally separate entities ("parent company"). Unless Honey has an agreement with Paypal that it can audit and enforce - which as a subsidiary, why would it want to - then once PayPal has the data, its actual use of it is governed by the privacy policy between the user and PayPal if there is an existing relationship or ???

It sounds like all Honey and Paypal need to do is find a half plausible justification from the PP for the data transfer; once it's handed over, Paypal is basically free to do whatever it wants.

Re: Inside a viral website

#244

Post by rchaud » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 9:35 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #76

TeMPOraL wrote: post #72

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.

IMO this wouldn't be a bad thing. There would be a stronger market mechanism at play here. It could cut down on the amount of garbage internet we consume, while incentivizing producers to create higher-value content that people will pay for, and that won't be forgotten immediately like this Suez website.

Re: Inside a viral website

#245

Post by gjs278 » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

iamacyborg wrote: post #174

lancesells wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree on there being environmental costs and NFTs seemingly terribly wasteful (since it's a digital file) have you considered the costs of what people buy in their day to day? I would love to see what the environmental comparison of an NBA NFT is compared to producing a souvenir basketball. My guess would be that it's lower and more renewable but I could be wrong.

> have you considered the costs of what people buy in their day to day? Yes. It's not relevant to this discussion. The author did not need to mint an NFT and there was clearly no real demand for one. Creating an NBA NFT and then managing the ongoing bids will produce orders of magnitude more CO2 than selling a souvenir ball. Quartz recently published a good breakdown comparing selling and shipping a print vs selling…

yawn. stop wasting electrons with your posts.

Re: Inside a viral website

#246

Post by iamacyborg » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #237

iamacyborg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hosting costs pennies (if even that) if you’re just serving static html content.

Re: Inside a viral website

#247

Post by rainonmoon » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

DangerousPie wrote: post #101

mromanuk wrote: post #36

> As was pointed out in a quote tweet by the Vercel CEO, the problem wasn’t Next.js at all, but the Vesselfinder embedded map taking a while to load (because everyone wanted to check the Ever Given’s status) That was an opportunity, to cache the map as an image, and switch it later to the proper map.

But is it worth the trouble for a meme site that won’t be relevant in a week? There are probably more fun things to do with your time.

He minted the site as an NFT. Dude had time.

Re: Inside a viral website

#248

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

tjs8rj wrote: post #206

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> The fallacy comes from forgetting these are people.

Perhaps. But at least that's just on paper. Resorting to advertising means actually forgetting your visitors are people.

Re: Inside a viral website

#249

Post by z3t4 » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

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…

What it comes down to is what similar services charge. Study the business model of the other/exchangeable services that are actually profitable.

Re: Inside a viral website

#250

Post by another_sock » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #112

joosters wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand, what was sold here exactly? This question applies to all NFTs! All you 'own' is a smart contract on a blockchain. That contract might contain a URL, and that URL might have some content on it. Or it could be a broken link. But you definitely do not own the thing that the URL points to. Nor do you have any guarantee that there are no other NFTs on the blockchain using that same URL. Luckily e…

Oh, so normally NFTs don't actually contain the digital artwork, just a reference to it? I assumed that the art itself would be stored into the blockchain, which would give it some form of permanence.

Yeah, most NFTs are just references to a database hosting a file somewhere. There are exceptions, but this is the case with sites like Rarible as far as I know. The exceptions are less popular and less well known because they aren't scams and are actually interesting technology-wise, and thus aren't doing a ton of marketing or promotion or being used for money laundering or tax scams like most NFTs currently are.