Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?

What's the niche?

It's more work, but you can generate similar levels of income - or sometimes more - using affiliate programs from sites like Commission Junction, ShareASale, and Clickbank. You'll need to test and optimise, but the rewards can be considerable.

I suggest to come up with your own buyable products (tutorials, how-to's, etc..) and show half of it (teaser) to everyone and allow to see the rest to paid members.

Then you may charge per download, or full access based on recurring membership fee.

You may also offer free membership to capture emails and then market to interested visitors further.

Whoring your traffic to other people's platforms or products leaves no residual value to you and makes you vulnerable to other people TOS'es, moods and playrules.

The point is to use Google what it's good for - to send you prospects.

Your task is to capture prospect's contacts and establish relationships with them.

Begging for Adsense peanuts is unsustainable strategy as many people are finding out the hard way.

(PS: I worked on bulding membership site software that allows you to do just that with a few clicks)

Thanks for your feedback. Yeah, this is probably the direction we will eventually have to go. I really like this approach, but we'd rather focus on the content and articles now versus, say, the business side of it - unless it grows into something bigger.

My other thought was to put new articles up with a community-based bitcoin paywall. Basically if we receive "X" donations from the community, this article becomes public forever. I'm not sure how that will be received by our user base though (tech, web developers).

For ads, I don't think others pay quite as well, and even those that come close, usually require at least 100,000 uniques a month or something like that.

But if it's not too irrelevant to that topic, I suggest combining whatever ad network you have with Amazon affiliate links. It helped me double my Adsense income for the same traffic.

Ultimately, if you have some quality service or content that you can sell, membership/subscription model is the best. I know someone who just gave up on Adsense, and was making 10x the Adsense revenue from subscriptions.

Depends on the type of traffic, but I think it's best to just push CPA offers, or actual products from places like cj or clickbank