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Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

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Re: Inside a viral website

#121

Post by dmos62 »

skrebbel wrote: post #116
dmos62 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it's mandatory to become a different kind of person or to market yourself in extroverted ways. I think you could get that effect with subtler things. I guess we often treat our works and online presence (as in open source or open access projects) as functional non-human items. Maybe if we saw them more as extensions of the author...

Re: Inside a viral website

#123

Post by VBprogrammer »

iamacyborg wrote: post #120
twox2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In the article he mentioned this; he was worried about the hosting costs. Thankfully his host got a laugh out of it and donated the hosting cost and he has in turn donated any proceeds.

Re: Inside a viral website

#124

Post by at_a_remove »

rebelde wrote: post #78
twox2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

In the grim future of 2050, we have finally implemented micropayments on the Internet, down to amounts as tiny as a thousandth of one cent and trending downward as we account for hyperinflation of other currencies. Advanced technologies, ubiquitous computing, brilliant algorithms, and near-sentient fraud watchdog programs have combined to make this dream at last possible.

Only then we will have proved that the vast majority of people will not pay a dime for content on the web.

Re: Inside a viral website

#125

Post by codingdave »

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…

Reverse that - how many websites do you visit, and look for a way to give them a dollar?

It just isn't how web audiences operate. I'm not saying that it is a bad idea - paying for good content could solve many problems. It just isn't where we are today.

Re: Inside a viral website

#126

Post by iamacyborg »

brianmorris10 wrote: post #12
artembugara wrote: post #6

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?

Swag. Set up some shitty designs on one of those dropshipping sites and a storefront. Mugs, hoodies, etc.

And sell what exactly? It’s not like he owns the copyright on the maritime map or on photographs of the ever given.

Re: Inside a viral website

#127

Post by DoreenMichele »

bkanber wrote: post #86
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…

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…

You are correct that asking for donations doesn't work.

If you think of it as donations and you talk about it like donations, people view you as a "charity case" begging for money. Good luck with that.

If you position it as tips and payment for the value you deliver, you can turn it into money. It's not easy, it's not consistent and it's probably not a way to get rich quick.

But there are people who are successfully supporting their work with Patreon and tips as at least part of the scheme.

It takes work to get money out of people. You probably didn't do anywhere near enough to promote the idea that "We need X more money to release version 2." And you probably positioned the request for money very poorly.

Just because you didn't pull it off doesn't mean it cannot be done.

Re: Inside a viral website

#128

Post by mkr-hn »

henvic wrote: post #47
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…

NFT is just a joke went too far. I'm starting to consider creating a NFT to sell NFTs of NFTs emitted elsewhere. Or one for people who doesn't "own an asset" to sell it.

NFT-backed securities are both inevitable and worrying.

Re: Inside a viral website

#129

Post by iamacyborg »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #123
iamacyborg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

In the article he mentioned this; he was worried about the hosting costs. Thankfully his host got a laugh out of it and donated the hosting cost and he has in turn donated any proceeds.

Right, but if you're incurring significant hosting costs for a static site in 2021 then you're doing something wrong.

Re: Inside a viral website

#130

Post by BrandoElFollito »

camillomiller wrote: post #37

The main takeaway for me: > In my day job, we use Next.js for almost everything we build. It’s a framework built on top of React that just strips out almost all the complexity of building fairly complicated websites. Obviously, this wasn’t a complicated website, but I went with what I’m most familiar with. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail :D Edit to say that I think it's an amazing little wholesom…

I am an amateur dev and since I more or less learned Vue and the Quasar framework, every web site looks like a Vue&Quasar nail to me.

It works - i can pop out sites that work in a mall amount of time. They will never be istheshipstillstuck.com-famous or cnn.com-loaded, or never be used in some countries where loading 10 MB of JS is a problem.

they are used by me, on my 1000/400 Mbps connection, or by my children on a LAN.

So having a hammer that works-sort-of-always-but-not-optimal is better than having a stupendous ultra-refined tool that is the exact fit for the work - but requires 100 hours to learn and 430 pages of docs translated by Google from Swahili to French.

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