Live data from Hacker News

Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

271–280 of 305 posts

Re: Inside a viral website

#271
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I first saw 'single serving friend' in Fight Club [0], do you think the idea was lifted from there? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1iQp8g9SQo

in 2016 I made a single serving website it's only purpose is to copy emojis to your clipboard, it is kinda popular now it gets 6K users a day but moste of the visits are from Russia so it is a bit hard to monetise www.emojilo.com

how much has this site made since 2016

Re: Inside a viral website

#272
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…

Is there a way to limit access to the feature request page only to the people that have donated anything?

Re: Inside a viral website

#273
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 works if you're also an active member of the community you've created.

People donated over $130k to Tarn and Zach Adams in 2020 (creators of Dwarf Fortress). Upon saying that, that's their sole source of income. I think a lot of players are aware that if they don't donate, Dwarf Fortress will never be finished. Well, it never will anyway but...

But Tarn actively gives updates on his work, creates podcasts, and participates in the forum, and has been doing that for more than a decade. I'm not sure if he still does it, but if you donated, he'd draw you a picture and send it to you in the post. I've still got mine from 10 years ago.

Or maybe Morse Code people are just cheapskates.

Re: Inside a viral website

#274

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…

We run a few high traffic websites, and would be great to monetize our US traffic at $10 cpm. But your profile link to your LinkedIn page returns a Page not available error. Please get in touch - would be great to chat.

Re: Inside a viral website

#275
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 made a campsite alert website to send you an email and text message when a campsite becomes available so you can book it. I put up a buy me a coffee page and in a month, had over $500 in donations.

Re: Inside a viral website

#276
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 feel like this is partly, if not mostly, a facilitation issue with the payment itself.

I signed up for Patreon to support one member, but its so easy to add/remove people to the monthly dole that I’m now up to $40/mo. I know you’re not asking for advice here but maybe something like that would be worth a shot if you haven’t tried already.

(I know that clientele though, so maybe Patreon isn’t the best route lol)

Re: Inside a viral website

#277

Great article - funny & interesting :) Question about "Ads/advertisements" (I'm totally clueless about how they work): Does anybody have a link pointing to some kind of overview from the point of view of a website owner? (e.g. list of different providers, amounts paid by views/clicks, which informations are/can be exchanged with them to provide for example an ad in the same context of what the website is showing, etc…

The wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising is a starting place. There is also a vast swag of stuff related to digital marketing here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Online_advertising but it will require significant digging to work out what's useful for your interest.

Also this part of the ads.google.com site https://ads.google.com/intl/en_NZ/home/resources/advanced/ has a reasonable amount of stuff within it but obviously only from a Google point of view. I don't suppose it matters but that's the NZ version of the page, probably only the 0800 number is specific to NZ but you might change en_NZ to whatever your language code is.

Re: Inside a viral website

#278
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM Uh, not in my experience. I haven't tried to monetize a site like this, but I would expect a CPM around 1 cent. Still, times 50 million, it isn't nothing.

> I would expect a CPM around 1 cent. Still, times 50 million, it isn't nothing. CPM is cost per mille, AKA cost per thousand impressions. Revenue from 50,000,000 impressions would be CPM * 50,000.

Thanks for specifying this. There's a typo/arithmetic error in the original comment, which led me to assume CPM must mean 'per 100'.

Re: Inside a viral website

#279
post #233

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.

Does gold affect the ranking of a comment (i.e. where it is displayed on the page)? I guess I never really thought about it, but I assumed not.

If it's all about the icon displayed next to the comment header, I suppose that's a kind of amplification -- but it seems like less of a zero-sum game, because it's not forcing another opinion out of view.

Re: Inside a viral website

#280
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my developer tool with thousands of stars on GitHub generates $15/yr in donations, I would say 0.01% of visitors each donating $1 to a website they on average spend 1 minute or less on (seems a reasonable assumption?) is far too optimistic.

Can you give any other metric for its popularity? Stars aren't a good one - Github stars are bookmarks , not a reflection of whether one actually uses a given repository. Personally, I have 301 starred repositories, of which I maybe use... 5?

I'm one of the maintainers of Streamlink [1] which has members from around the world and we've been running various methods of donation since 2017 or so. In that time our Open Collective [2] has made about $1600 USD. We have 6k+ stars, and over 50,000 users across all platforms (based on download stats as we don't collect any metrics in our apps so it's potentially higher) yet the entire amount we've collected is thanks to less than 100 people. We note the Open Collective on every release as well, and have donation links in the documentation.

My own personal donation methods total $15 from one person in the past 5 years since we forked the project and started maintaining it. We have more users than many start ups do and I know that there are several companies using our software.

[1]: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink [2]: https://opencollective.com/streamlink

Post reply on HN