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Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

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Re: Inside a viral website

#151

Post by kevinstubbs »

soared wrote: post #141
kevinstubbs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$10 rpm, lol what do you only accept finance and law blogs?

Ah I wish, those would get far far higher. No this is what we see at typical online newspapers from purely remnant advertising (not taking into account direct sales).

Re: Inside a viral website

#152

Post by crazypython »

This is terribly overengineered. He just needs a static CDN host– such as Surge.sh, Netlify, AWS CloudFront, or Cloudflare. Everything can be calculated clientside.

> It’s worth pointing out that for all the criticism, the Next.js + Vercel combination meant that I didn’t have to worry about scaling the site at any point. There were millions of hits, and sometimes thousands per second, and it all just worked. The basic page continued to load in less than half a second under all that load.

Static sites have that too.

Re: Inside a viral website

#154

Post by lancesells »

KMnO4 wrote: post #27
oefrha wrote: post #4

> These reports aren’t just limited to the products you recommend — if someone buys anything within a 24 hour period of clicking your link, you can see, and you get commission. Anyone else find this a pretty gross violation of privacy on Amazon’s part? Why should your unrelated purchases be disclosed to affiliates just because you clicked an affiliate link for whatever reason? Let’s say the affiliate website use acco…

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…

And then what does that say about the written article? It's just metrics driven for what is the "best". It's truly a terrible system that's taken place over the last 20 years or so.

Re: Inside a viral website

#155

Post by ryantgtg »

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…

Have you tried Patreon? I had the same experience with a donation button. But a Patreon button magically gave us steady money to support infrastructure.

Re: Inside a viral website

#156

Post by lancesells »

iamacyborg wrote: post #122
dave_sullivan wrote: post #68

I appreciated the breakdown of steps involved in selling an NFT. Cool writeup.

Yeah, except for entirely glossing over the environmental aspect of that process.

While I agree on there being environmental costs and NFTs seemingly terribly wasteful (since it's a digital file) have you considered the costs of what people buy in their day to day? I would love to see what the environmental comparison of an NBA NFT is compared to producing a souvenir basketball. My guess would be that it's lower and more renewable but I could be wrong.

Re: Inside a viral website

#157

Post by l00sed »

I'd love if someone could point me in the direction of WHY this Next.js setup "just works". This was a great article, and the author described the sensation of getting traffic very well. I've been on the other side of the coin where my apache server crashed or 50* error'd out. It would be interesting to know more about what makes this stack or this server architecture "just work" under the hug of death.

Re: Inside a viral website

#158

Post by kbenson »

ryantgtg wrote: post #155
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 tried Patreon? I had the same experience with a donation button. But a Patreon button magically gave us steady money to support infrastructure.

Yeah, I'm a patron of multiple people, from Authors to people running a website providing info on a game, that are making $10k-$20k a month in Patreon from those projects through $5-$10 monthly payments. It's amazing how much money you can make, but I think you really do have to offer something to get people to bite.

Re: Inside a viral website

#159

Post by bkanber »

iamacyborg wrote: post #119
thrashh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Each time Wikipedia does a donation drive they have a thing that says "If everyone who used Wikipedia donated $1, we'd be done in 10 minutes!" (or similar). Yet these drives go on for months. The problem is that only a vanishingly small percentage of users donate.

Re: Inside a viral website

#160

Post by kyawzazaw »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #127
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…

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…

Has that been your experience?
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