Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 189 posts

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#71

Post by daveguy »

mysterypie wrote: post #45
Cherian wrote: post #3

I can speak for the food blogging industry. This is my wife’s blog[1] A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4[2]. Where it gets interesting are the RPM numbers. If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks and become a preferred partner, you can rake up to $12-15in RPM [3]. Here’s more of multiple revenue sources for a successful blog [4…

> A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4 You're taking a risk here. By mentioning this, a good fraction of the 300K Hacker News daily uniques will visit your site as I did, and some may be gourmands. Excellent uncluttered presentation and mouth-watering photography by the way. On the other hand, you tipped off the largest gathering of highly motivated, entrepreneurial web deve…

In addition to what owebmaster said, and no offense, but if some random person takes it up they will probably do it shittier and get significantly fewer unique visitors.

I expect OP enjoys and is knowledgeable about the subject. They are married (content and tech) so they get to pool results. If you paid someone who was passionate about it there will be turnover. If you do it on your own just for the money and you aren't passionate and knowledgeable the site will just suck.

It's not that easy to get visitors and if they are paying out like that then there is probably plenty of room for additional actors.

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#72

Post by BatFastard »

phoboslab wrote: post #26

I make about $600/mo pretty consistently with a typing game ( http://zty.pe ) - about 200k visits/mo. I once managed another project that had about 14m visits/mo and made a meager $3000. Bad target demographic.

I was wondering how you monetized it, until I realized my ad blocker was probably blocking everything...

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#73

Post by joshvm »

natvod wrote: post #18

@csallen could probably jump in with some interesting insights. His site Indie Hackers was generating $5K a month from ad rev before it was acquired by Stripe ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14090063 ). He actively reached out to relevant companies to ask them to place ads on his website. If you brokered these type of ad partnerships, you could easily make a few thousand with your audience. Ad types include: s…

I mentioned this in another post, but I believe this is how most seriously profitable bloggers make their money. They don't go for Google ads, they go for affiliate deals and sponsorship.

It's a smarter way to do it because the adverts are usually far far more relevant to the audience. Nothing annoys me more than generic clickbait advertising ("Release your equity!", "What did these 10 people do to get rich?", etc) which I'm never going to click on. On the other hand if I see a food blog sponsored by e.g. KitchenAid, I might have another look at their mixers.

If you have the readership and a trusting community (or reputation), it's a no brainer. This is how Daring Fireball does it too.

Affiliate links are another good way of subtly making cash - look at people like Ken Rockwell, who was once the de facto "Nikon Guy". His site was (is?) the go to place for Nikon camera/lens reviews. There are no ads on his site, but every damn link is affiliated (and why not?). This is also a very sneaky way for airline reward bloggers to make tons of points: they find the deals, everyone goes through the affiliate links and earns their meager 100 avios, while the blogger makes a tidy referral profit. The guy who runs Head for Points [1] made thousands when the Curve Card was released.

[1] http://www.headforpoints.com/2017/01/12/curve-rewards-launch...

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#74

Post by jlarocco »

notadoc wrote: post #25
jlarocco wrote: post #15

> So I am thinking of revenue model based on ads. At its 'full' potential web application can draw a million visits per month (in 2-3 years may be). Please don't. Find a way to charge money for it, or accept that it's really not that valuable. Sad how everybody thinks merely hosting a website entitles them to revenue now.

People are accustomed to paying nothing on the web, unless it's a physical product nobody is paying for anything.

Yet Github, Dropbox, Fog Creek, Atlassian, and thousands of others aren't shutting down.

Maybe it's time to raise the bar a little bit and stop funding these services that nobody really values but will use because they're "free".

Ad supported companies have a strong tendency to invade people's privacy, track people around the internet, provide almost no customer support, and refuse service (or shutdown) on a whim. Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. do it all the time, and it's the same way all the way down to the smaller players. Generally they're just not very good companies.

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#77

Post by Cherian »

mysterypie wrote: post #45
Cherian wrote: post #3

I can speak for the food blogging industry. This is my wife’s blog[1] A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4[2]. Where it gets interesting are the RPM numbers. If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks and become a preferred partner, you can rake up to $12-15in RPM [3]. Here’s more of multiple revenue sources for a successful blog [4…

> A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4 You're taking a risk here. By mentioning this, a good fraction of the 300K Hacker News daily uniques will visit your site as I did, and some may be gourmands. Excellent uncluttered presentation and mouth-watering photography by the way. On the other hand, you tipped off the largest gathering of highly motivated, entrepreneurial web deve…

If only people would work hard as my wife, be relentlessly passionate and marginally improve routinely...

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#78

Post by Cherian »

tomerbd wrote: post #49
Cherian wrote: post #3

I can speak for the food blogging industry. This is my wife’s blog[1] A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4[2]. Where it gets interesting are the RPM numbers. If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks and become a preferred partner, you can rake up to $12-15in RPM [3]. Here’s more of multiple revenue sources for a successful blog [4…

i don't get it how do all you guys get so much traffic you talk about 100k's and millions of people visiting your web sites how do you make that happen?!?

Keep on writing content where you can be good (it all starts with the passion). Healthy Desserts, Everyday 30-minute cooking, Asian cooking for Americans, etc. Learn from Google what the audience intent is, improve your content. Do this for four years; you’ll get 300K/month. Then there’s SEO, Pinterest optimization [1], better photography, Lightroom skills, video shooting & editing, etc. You’ll learn this along the way. After that, there’s a good chance traffic will compound.

But you have to show up at 5 AM every day (I can’t find that Kobe Bryant quote)

[1]: https://in.pinterest.com/janerosep/a-little-bit-of-spice-fro...

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#79

Post by Mz »

Cherian wrote: post #78
tomerbd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't get it how do all you guys get so much traffic you talk about 100k's and millions of people visiting your web sites how do you make that happen?!?

Keep on writing content where you can be good (it all starts with the passion). Healthy Desserts, Everyday 30-minute cooking, Asian cooking for Americans, etc. Learn from Google what the audience intent is, improve your content. Do this for four years; you’ll get 300K/month. Then there’s SEO, Pinterest optimization [1], better photography, Lightroom skills, video shooting & editing, etc. You’ll learn this along the w…

How often was it updated?

Then there’s SEO, Pinterest optimization [1], etc. You’ll learn this along the way.

Don't be so sure about that. People who are telling you "I can't imagine" are probably failing to get much traffic. I don't have that kind of traffic on anything and I boggle at the idea of getting it.

So, a bit more detail and resource links would be appreciated. If a few blurbs were going to do it, then people wouldn't be asking you.

Re: Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

#80

Post by Cherian »

joshvm wrote: post #68
notadoc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow I had no idea food blogging was a profitable thing. Congrats to your wife. > If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks Isn't that impossible to get 100% filled? I recall reading a while back that getting even 40% was challenging which is why the ad quality online has gone down and they're more intrusive? Lots of interesting stuff on this thread, thanks for sharing.

Food blogging is an enormous market. The best foodies don't get money from Adsense though, it's through sponsorship/affiliate deals, books if they hit it big. It's quite a stereotyped field though, and I would imagine it's a saturated market. Everyone wants to be like Deliciously Ella [1]. Don't even try unless you have a studio setup for the photography. Lots of food authors are pivoting towards more (usually female…

You are right. We have around $3000 worth of lighting equipment, lens, etc. But we acquired them along the way.

Sponsored content is a good chunk of money (close to 30% every mom) but its nonscalable.

Post reply on HN