an ordinary tale of, one of the millions of adsense-salary drawers, who were suddenly fired. Starting from the 1st 'Panda' update. I didn't know it mattered much in the 1st First world, but imagine this in countries like India & Pakistan. Little young boys became super-rich and bought flats in Dubai and what not. Now again back to earth. All of them are now fat and depressed, like the one writing this comment ;)
Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
61–70 of 173 posts
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#62The general online audience has matured over the past 10 years, and most people have an excellent filter to avoid clicking ads, which includes affiliate links. You can still monetize a site these days, and make some money while not being sketchy, but it requires approaching it as a service to your users, not as an exploit of your users. What I mean by this is that whatever your site is, if your audience has a legit i…
>I'm somewhat surprised that anyone would have spent 10 years flailing in this arena and not learned that. "I’ve always had some type of entrepreneur trapped inside me. [...] I decided I’ll start a blog and make money via AdSense ads." This is not the thought process of someone with the competence to know how to learn effectively. It sounds like someone who just wants to be a cog in a money wheel, both learning as li…
The credit limit was about fronting money to grow the business.
Overall I think HN is being too harsh. This is a person taking a rather honest look at himself and giving us a glimpse into his life that also happens to capture an interesting history of the Internet.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#63Just a friendly note, you may want to do some revisions/proofreading.
I think comments like this are OT and misplaced. It adds nothing to our discussion here and assumes that the author will read all of the comments here (though I did note that in this case the author has submitted the post himself). This is direct correspondence to the author, so send him a message.
I think everyone else agreed with you, just found it a bit distracting when reading the article and I rarely comment on grammar or spelling, the post was fresh when I made the comment and the post was made by the blog author. I made an assumption he'd be monitoring the thread and made a friendly note here, or so I thought.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Founding a real startup with real products also leads to failure most of the time. We just hear about the successes more often on HN.
I would imagine that online 'get rich quick schemes' have an even higher rate of failure than most startups. Perhaps 99.99% versus 90-95%?
With some startups it's hard to distinguish between the two to be honest. I almost feel like the way the media covers startups they are a "get rich quick scheme". What percentage have a successful exit? I don't know. I did hit the startup lottery once as a late hire and got about $8k from the acquisition.
However, I do agree I would have better spent those years thinking about how I could solve people's problems instead preying on their insecurities.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#65There are plenty of legitimate products out there to promote, but those Acai Berry/Weight loss rebill offers were really shady and one had to have absolutely no moral compass to promote those. Even newbies knew that they were flat-out scams(for the customer). You would see marketers justifying these products by saying that the customers were suckers for not reading the TOS or that nothing was wrong with rebilling(cit…
I agree. There are plenty of legitimate channels that use affiliates and there are tons of shady ones.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#66We have a great deal in common. I followed a similar path to yours, and somewhere along the way moved into the Advertiser side of the equation, where the potential upside is much higher. Being a solo affiliate these days has been usurped by large companies posing as 'ad networks,' reselling traffic on the open exchange. With your background, you could make a lot more (in the form of salary and bonus) by marketing at a company that has a large marketing budget. I personally know affiliate vets like myself that pull 500k+ salary and bonus, whilst also having side projects. This is definitely one of those cases in which your skills are more valuable promoting an existing business than starting your own.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#67I'm not sure I'd regard making 100's of thousands of dollars complete failure. Now, it's obvious that he made money in ways that aren't overly useful to society, and promoted products that were less than stellar in spammy ways, but just having the goal of "Making Money Online" I'd consider that money to be pretty dang successful. The fact that he blew it all after the fact just makes him bad with money. It doesn't me…
"Now, it's obvious that he made money in ways that aren't overly useful to society.."
FYI making markets more efficient is definitely useful to society by reducing costs / bid ask spread. In particular this helps those who get the most utility from this savings, the poor and middle class.
Obviously I'm setting aside the ethics of some of his ways and speaking in general. (Although you'd probably want this competition even more so in unethical markets because at least those markets are then more efficient for those getting scammed, ie the poor and stupid.)
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think comments like this are OT and misplaced. It adds nothing to our discussion here and assumes that the author will read all of the comments here (though I did note that in this case the author has submitted the post himself). This is direct correspondence to the author, so send him a message.
I think everyone else agreed with you, just found it a bit distracting when reading the article and I rarely comment on grammar or spelling, the post was fresh when I made the comment and the post was made by the blog author. I made an assumption he'd be monitoring the thread and made a friendly note here, or so I thought.
I did take your friendly note and go back through the post but I'm just terrible at catching those things.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#69I hate these picture gallery clickbaits sites on facebook. If you are visting mobile, almost every "next" click redirects you to some ad site and you "have to go back". And yes, I still click on them because i want to see funny/sexy stuff ;-) I will never understand though how people manage to just "burn" serveral thousands of dollars after they got them. I like to save and don't need any of this funky stuff. Why wou…
>Why would I want to spend 1200$ on some vodka? Why would you spend 2300$ on some laptop? Could be value, status, money to splurge? Different people different preferences. To a millionaire there is little difference between a 1200 bottle and a 500 bottle, yet for 'regular people' there is. Perspective ...
Yeah, but i can buy the 1200 vodka also for 10 at the store. Does not work the same way with the laptop. Also, the laptop lasts longer. Also the writer wasnt and isnt rich.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#70The general online audience has matured over the past 10 years, and most people have an excellent filter to avoid clicking ads, which includes affiliate links. You can still monetize a site these days, and make some money while not being sketchy, but it requires approaching it as a service to your users, not as an exploit of your users. What I mean by this is that whatever your site is, if your audience has a legit i…
I'm one of those people who has approached content creation strictly "as a service to your users, not as an exploit of your users." All of my blog posts are very carefully researched, in-depth guides, sometimes literally taking over 100 hours of research and writing for a single post.
I made very little money for years and had just about given up until Panda 4.1 and Penguin 3.0. Since then, when I write well, Google is sending traffic my way, and my traffic and income have been steadily increasing by 20%-30%/month. I now have the incentive to keep adding more high quality content to my blog.
Prior to these Panda/Penguin updates (Sep/Oct 2014), I can totally understand why so many attempted to do what the author did. It made more money. Even if Google algorithm changes or Affiliate changes shut you down, jumping to the next thing seemed to work.
Hopefully Google is ahead of the curve once and for all, providing greater incentive to create great content than game the system.