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Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

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Re: Inside a viral website

#111

Post by LordAtlas »

SamBam wrote: post #29
KMnO4 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think seeing all the random items is collateral damage. It can possibly be fixed (only show purchases in the category that you referred?). As the affiliate, the insights are invaluable. Imagine you hosted a sleep blog and directed people to a particular memory foam pillow. If you saw they ended up purchasing a different pillow, you could change the link to better serve your readers. Or if you saw that they ended up…

No one doubts that it's useful for the people standing to make money off of this. I think the question was whether it was an invasion of the reader's privacy, who probably don't realize that the blog owner can now track their buying habits.

Only in the aggregate. The site owner doesn't know who purchased what. Only Amazon (obviously) knows.

The site owner only sees that 35 people bought book X while 24 people bought book Y.

Re: Inside a viral website

#112

Post by simias »

joosters wrote: post #46
simias wrote: post #39

>Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the page. I’d read a fair amount about NFTs (both good and bad), and I was a mix of sceptical and curious. I thought this would be an interesting and weird opportunity to try it out myself. Added to this, it could be a fun meta-meme. I thought it would be fun to be the first meme website to sell itself as an NFT. I don't quite understand, what was sold here ex…

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.

Re: Inside a viral website

#113

Post by vulcan01 »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #98

It is fascinating how our online behavior deviates from our physical world behavior. This whole thread is about how asking for donations is a big fail online. Yet, there's no lack of street performers in most major metros. Whether that is people in superhero costumes on Hollywood Blvd, or street dancers in times square, they all seem to be doing fine off donations. There is something about the online "free duplicate…

> they all seem to be doing fine off donations.

They may be doing fine, but I bet that, for most, donations aren't their only source of income and they probably have another job.

Re: Inside a viral website

#114

Post by StavrosK »

kamel3d wrote: post #80
pjmorris wrote: post #15

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

I have needed that often, thanks for making an easy site!

Re: Inside a viral website

#115

Post by WJW »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #67
oefrha wrote: 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?

Stars are even worse than bookmarks, they're more like likes on social media. Costs nothing and worth nothing, literally imaginary internet validation points. "Oh this is a cool thing, I'll star it why not."

Re: Inside a viral website

#116

Post by skrebbel »

dmos62 wrote: post #103
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…

Not to criticize you in any way, but I've found that asking me for financial support works in some cases and those are because I felt the "humanness" of the creator. I remember this author that put up a video of her unboxing first batch of her newly released book (and being excited about it). The person went from a name on a webpage or face in a video to a human being immediately (in my mind). I don't really have the…

That's all true but it means that you need to market your person, become an "internet personality" just to collect donations on something technical that you built

It works, true, eg Andrew Kelley is funding his Zig work that way and it's pretty amazing to see him ace it. But damn you gotta be a particular kind of person to not get extremely stressed out about that prospect.

Re: Inside a viral website

#117

Post by WJW »

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.

That only works for digital things, for obvious reasons.

Re: Inside a viral website

#118

Post by rapnie »

jawns wrote: post #109
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…

Have you considered some sort of conditional pledging system? That was part of the original allure of Kickstarter: participants agreed to contribute money -- but they only had to pay it if the total pledged amount reached a certain threshold. That way, contributors got some assurance that they're not wasting their money and that any project they fund has some level of viability. So maybe, in your case, you could ask…

Snowdrift has a scheme like this, but even better: Crowdmatching, where your donation increases as more people jump in (and you can set a max donation).

https://snowdrift.coop/

Re: Inside a viral website

#119

Post by iamacyborg »

thrashh wrote: post #105
input_sh wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I always feel like there has to be some reward to incentivize people, even if it's dead simple. Like, you can choose to have your name publicly displayed on a thank you page (this would work well with BMAC, since donations can be both anonymous and not), or have your username be of different colour or have some badge next to it. But then again, I don't know how I would fit that into this meme page, and…

I’ve run a few donation schemes and those things don’t do much. People just don’t donate. Subscriptions are the best, but obv that won’t work for a meme page.

So how does Wikipedia manage to get donations? Is it just a scale problem where you needs hundreds of millions of pageviews a day to generate any meaningful number of donations?

Re: Inside a viral website

#120

Post by iamacyborg »

twox2 wrote: post #63
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…

Who would pay $1 for getting a chuckle out of a meme? Also 50 million views is not 50 million visitors. If he had a normal ad monetization channel in place, he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM and walked away with at least $5k from his 15 minutes of fame. The problem is that learning as you go makes it a little too late to monetize the peak. There are companies whose entire business…

> 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?

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