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Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

251–260 of 305 posts

Re: Inside a viral website

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Cloudflare Pages[0] claims to have unlimited bandwidth, even for their free tier.

0. https://pages.cloudflare.com/#plans

Re: Inside a viral website

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what game?

Escape From Tarkov. It's a real interesting mix of shooter, stealth, and looting/management that I haven't really seen anywhere else. It's on the realism side of the spectrum, which I like. It's also extremely unforgiving, which is good for those that are a bit masochistic in their gaming, which apparently I am. There's lots to unpack there that make it different than most other games I've played, but you can get a g…

I also pay for tarkov-market :D

It is almost a must if you're a casual player. It is too hard to keep up with the barters, flea market rates and even just the quests and items for quests.

Re: Inside a viral website

#254
post #86

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…

I agree with your assessment that donations do not work. Now let me solve your problem: Instead of running into the tragedy of the commons by asking your userbase collectively to donate 1k, you can announce that you will start working on v2 now and let users pay to prioritize individual feature requests in each new release. Start with a small release adding only a feature that you want but nobody else requested to prove that the project is active again. Create scarcity by only doing 1 release / timeframe and only include the feature with the most money pledged. Hope for a bidding war.

Re: Inside a viral website

#255
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

$10 PAGE RPM is the key here people. Not a great metric to go by. Ad impression RPM is the number to compare. I'd be interested to know the average number of ads/page you need to display to achieve a $10 rpm. At any rate, you can get that on AdSense no problem with very little hassle and net 30 payments.

Re: Inside a viral website

#256

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…

This never works. People just don't donate. Only developers think donations are a viable form of monetization.

Re: Inside a viral website

#257
post #86

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.

It can work. It just depends on how strong your community is.

When I lived in Houston, I was a member of a local discussion forum that was on a .info domain. One day, a domain squatter offered to sell the .com version to the sysop for $15,000. The regular users pitched in, and got the money together in a few weeks.

Re: Inside a viral website

#258
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Escape From Tarkov. It's a real interesting mix of shooter, stealth, and looting/management that I haven't really seen anywhere else. It's on the realism side of the spectrum, which I like. It's also extremely unforgiving, which is good for those that are a bit masochistic in their gaming, which apparently I am. There's lots to unpack there that make it different than most other games I've played, but you can get a g…

I also pay for tarkov-market :D It is almost a must if you're a casual player. It is too hard to keep up with the barters, flea market rates and even just the quests and items for quests.

Yep. :) I signed up a couple months ago for historical market data because I'm a sucker for that, but the added features since then have really cemented it as a good decision.

I haven't played in a few weeks though, from a combination of the friend I usually play with being less interested (and not wanting to level/quest much without him) and being busier myself. That's sad, because it really is pretty amazing once you get the hang of it (I just stared at beginning of this wipe) and have someone to play with. Playing alone is fun too, but with one or two good friends is really something special.

Re: Inside a viral website

#259

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…

I had a popular website which had 20MM views per month but made most of my money through ad banners. I tried direct sell for banners, links etc but they never materialized because you could actually pay cents on the dollar to do that through a network.

Also, one thing I learned on the website was that having 20 million views on your website does not equate to a consistent amount of money because the ads don't pay the sam e in every country.

For example, I had some ads pay $20CPM and some that paid $0.00001 because they were fillers, so I had to tweak my low fillers by signing up with local country ad networks who could provide better CPMs.

In the end, it still did not evolve into a large shift and the average was still lower, good but not great.

I think that these days, running your own website is good, you might still get 50MM views but not much income because ads are still not going to give you the best returns which is why some or more websites are shifting to a paywall. For the most time, everyone was good with ads, because that was what worked. Now it's paywalls and it will trend that way because they get the most value and a consistent payment that way (not many cancel active subscriptions over a period of time). Ads will still play significant amount of money for direct sellers like Google, Facebook, Twitter & Amazon, but not for third party sites who will have to find different ways.

There is also the upgrades to search engines and facebook/twitter etc to now keep you on their own website for everything and corner a full $$ vs paying third party websites a cut, which is why we see snippets etc in search engines and then people engage there more and click on a higher paying ad to them.

Also, there is ad-blockers, which means you are not getting any impressions on some percentage of the visitors in the first place.

Re: Inside a viral website

#260
post #94

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.

Uhh those seem like two really small loopholes. Buying the whole company makes sense. What is the alternative, the purchasing company has to accept that they'll purge all user accounts? Law enforcement.. What do you want them to do? Turn down a legal court order and say "naaa"?

> What is the alternative, the purchasing company has to accept that they'll purge all user accounts?

Have a transition window (say 3 months) before the sale goes into effect where users get to choose to either keep the account and allow the new owner access to the data, or to have their data destroyed. After that window, data from anyone who didn't respond gets deleted.

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