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Inside a viral website

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Re: Inside a viral website

#171

Post by ampdepolymerase »

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?

If you can build a PaaS around it like Giphy and sell user data, sure.

Re: Inside a viral website

#172

Post by dgritsko »

freedomben wrote: post #170
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…

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.

Isn't this the problem that Kickstarter was designed to solve?

Re: Inside a viral website

#173

Post by redisman »

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?

I think some merchandise or some other memento would've maybe worked? A t-shirt or a hat

Re: Inside a viral website

#174

Post by iamacyborg »

lancesells wrote: post #156
iamacyborg wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> have you considered the costs of what people buy in their day to day?

Yes. It's not relevant to this discussion. The author did not need to mint an NFT and there was clearly no real demand for one.

Creating an NBA NFT and then managing the ongoing bids will produce orders of magnitude more CO2 than selling a souvenir ball.

Quartz recently published a good breakdown comparing selling and shipping a print vs selling an NFT https://qz.com/1987590/the-carbon-footprint-of-creating-and-...

Re: Inside a viral website

#175

Post by ajayyy »

MisterBiggs wrote: post #165
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…

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.

Similar experience with my browser extension. A kind of weird mal-incentive.

Re: Inside a viral website

#176

Post by mtberatwork »

dx034 wrote: post #2

Interestingly, according to [1] there were only ~11k visitors from Hackernews for a post on the front page that had ~1k comments. I would've estimated the visitor/comment ratio to be much, much higher. [1] https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_sour...

Users tend to overwhelmingly read headlines and skip articles. HN is not any different than the rest of the Web. Something to keep in mind here and elsewhere.

Re: Inside a viral website

#177

Post by selestify »

whimsicalism wrote: post #143
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…

I bet you that this is a space where there is a reverse gender pay gap.

And also a space where nobody's going to crusade for fixing up the reverse gender pay gap.

Re: Inside a viral website

#178

Post by Sebb767 »

lancesells wrote: post #156
iamacyborg wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My guess would be that it's lower and more renewable but I could be wrong.

That'll really boil down on a discussion of power sources (there were a few threads on this last week). Basically, how much power does it use, is this power to spare, what's the percentage of renewable energy etc..

Re: Inside a viral website

#179

Post by gherkinnn »

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.

Adding to quicksnap's points:

- Next.js makes it dead-easy to statically generate your pages using various strategies. And static pages take few resources to serve. [0]

- It also gives you lots of info on bundle sizes, performance, and provides you with the tools to manage these.

- Vercel is optimised to serve these static pages on their CDN. [1] And your project quite literally a single terminal command away from being live.

- Both are very easy to get started with and a joy to use.

- I am in no way affiliated with Vercel. I just like their products.

[0] https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching

[1] https://vercel.com/docs/edge-network/overview

Re: Inside a viral website

#180

Post by iamacyborg »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #171
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?

If you can build a PaaS around it like Giphy and sell user data, sure.

Yeah but Giphy's a full on product, not just a static single page site.
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