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Inside a viral website

notfunatparties.substack.com

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Re: Inside a viral website

#161

Post by srmarm »

It's a bit of a time limited joke and not a business. If it was done as a business and ad heavy it wouldn't be shared so much.

Seems to me the best monetisation he could do is selling himself. Even a couple hours work off the back of it would have been beating any ad's etc.

I had a minor web hit in the 90s, tried to do affiliate links etc but nothing really worked but I did get a little bit of work from it that has been indirectly the launch pad for a few side projects. None made me rich but they've all been a step forward.

Re: Inside a viral website

#162

Post by tshaddox »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #131
mrtksn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax. IMHO that is a fallacy. Although %0.01 looks like a really small number there's no reason for it for not being %0.001 or %0.000001. When people do napkin math , it's a common theme to say that "If we only capture %1 of the market we would be $$$rich$$$" and they…

>IMHO that is a fallacy. Email spam works exactly this way. I think what you are pointing out correctly, is that the percentage might be incorrect; the principle is not.

The "principle" is just multiplication, and yes, if you multiply your number of visitors by a number that you make up, you can get any number you want as a result.

Re: Inside a viral website

#163

Post by jackdh »

crazypython wrote: post #152

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 basi…

S3 + Cloudfront would have worked like a charm.

Re: Inside a viral website

#164

Post by DoreenMichele »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #160
DoreenMichele wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes.

Re: Inside a viral website

#165

Post by MisterBiggs »

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…

I run a telegram bot that has a pretty large user base completely for free. I have a buy me a coffee setup for it and it gets almost zero views, except for when a feature breaks. When a feature breaks all the sudden buy me a coffee gets traffic and I start getting donations.

Really odd to think that if everything worked perfectly all the time I wouldn't have made any money on this project.

Re: Inside a viral website

#166

Post by PavleMiha »

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.

The vast majority of NFT's sell art that is not on the blockchain, is hosted somewhere else. There are some pixel art-y small things that people have put on the actual blockchain but it's rare.

Re: Inside a viral website

#167

Post by redisman »

camillomiller wrote: post #95
soneca wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in my view this was actually a very fitting nail for the hammer he had.

I disagree, most of what the website does wouldn't necessarily need all the next.js superstructure. It's a very simple and modular page. That said, mine definitely wasn't a strong criticism. I also think the process explanation was very enjoyable.

This is a news event related meme site. Of course you should use what you have muscle memory for so you can ship it in one day. Who cares if some other framework the author doesn't know would have done the job

Re: Inside a viral website

#168

Post by quicksnap »

l00sed wrote: post #157

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.

I've been working with Next for a couple of weeks, here's my take:

- Next.js aims for "pit of success" in building sites with React that are optimized for CDNs and small builds

- Deploying said sites to Vercel takes advantage of the CDNs, so most of the users are getting cached data.

So, for this site, I would assume:

- There is no backend - All the HTML is cached and contains a static generation of the page(s)

- The javascript is also cached

- Vercel CDN is fast.

That's it!

Re: Inside a viral website

#169

Post by redisman »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #136
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…

Yes, NFT's are one of the weirdest blockchain related scams/pyramid schemes yet.

Well since "ICO"s seem to be dead you gotta come up with something new to split the fools from their money.

Re: Inside a viral website

#170

Post by freedomben »

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…

I think part of the problem may be that you're still far from the goal. If I were a heavy user, I might consider donating $50. But there's a huge risk that you won't get to $1,000 and my money will be "wasted" (not wasted, but not bringing about the desired effect either). Because of that, I'm inclined not to do it. It seems to me like you've got a chicken and egg problem here.
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