Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?
Have a side project which is an analytics web application based on 100k+ records. I was initially thinking to get a small payment from each user. But it appears to me that - information provided can be easily scrapped from site (if someone really wants) and it won't make sense.
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).
Adrevenue calculators show adrevenue of $2000 dollars for a million visits[0] with 2 pages/visit and $1 RPM.
How realistic are these adrevenue calculators ?
Can anybody share their experience with real numbers and insights.
https://www.omnicalculator.com/business/website-ad-revenue\
edit: reformed sentence
188 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadA 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]
Caveat: Things take off once you cross around 700—800K US traffic. Until then it can be frustrating.
[1]: https://alittlebitofspice.com/
[2]: http://d.pr/i/bIBobD
[3]: http://d.pr/i/Qvk1M
[4]: http://d.pr/i/dEqpvA
> 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.
Edit: The money takes more than 6 years of hard work and a lot of content, social media management, brand building, sponsored writing, quality photography, now byte-size videos etc.
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 oriented) "lifestyle" blogs which happen to have recipes.
A lot of food blogs target healthy eating, or niche diets like keto/paleo. There are also tons of specialist food blogs covering bread, cakes, etc.
[1] https://deliciouslyella.com/
Sponsored content is a good chunk of money (close to 30% every mom) but its nonscalable.
Have a look at Strobist which is specifically aimed at flash photography.
Otherwise just look in photo or recipe books, food blogs and shamelessly steal until you get the hang of layout.
Also, uBlock tells me it only blocked two analytics scripts, no ads.
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 developers to a business idea that no one expected to be so profitable.
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.
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...
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.
When we started, we didn’t care about the traffic. We did it because we loved it.
Content updating happens every year or during vacations when we get bored or when we learn a new technique. For example, when we learned that good photographs increase the CTR by 10x, my wife started learning photography. When we learned that Pinterest optimized vertical images get 5x+ CTR [2], we implemented that a year back. There are many Facebook groups for these discussions.
[1] https://www.quicksprout.com/2015/05/11/how-im-going-to-achie... [2] https://in.pinterest.com/pin/527554543833038696/
No matter how much SEO optimization you will put into a website if the content is bad or not regularly updated (at least 2 - 3 times per week) you won't grow enough to see a significant revenue.
[I don't know if he said it, that's what I have in mind attributed to him]
[1]: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/japan...
It can be much smaller and still get the 'retina' effect, saving load time and bandwidth.
There are a lot of people with adblock these days, but also mobile traffic is not that profitable and people learned to ignore the ads as a noise. I am also using just one small rectangle per page and not going for more aggressive tactics.
During those 7 years I am down from "these apps are paying my rent" to "I can have a one meal in a nice restaurant each month".
The point is: it is getting much harder to make money by having ads in your app. Also make sure that all the information are recent and comes from your market sector as is changing real quick.
And it is soon to be built into web browsers, you have to wonder the impact that will have.
Besides, filter lists move pretty fast and are usually self-update.
I think that part of my problem (and it could be yours) is that I don't have a ton of written content around my free giveaways, which is the core of my site. Basically: plenty of cake, very little frosting.
Can anyone offer advice for increasing AdSense revenue for a site without much written content?
I run a site called Preset Love (http://presetlove.com) which gives away free Lightroom presets (Lightroom is an image editor for Adobe). My ad rates are abysmal and I've thought of walking away as a result.
I welcome feedback.
I also ran a Minecraft mods site for awhile with my son and at its top it made $9k/mo with about 130k unique visitor per month.
More tech content sites or other more general sites I have ran haven't gotten anywhere close to those #'s.
Games and entertainment content geared towards youth do well.
Ad placement also makes a difference. 1 well placed in-content ad can make you a lot more than 3 ads. That one well placed in-content ad can generate a higher CTR and CPC vs. if you place 3 ads. When you place multiple ads, the CTR on all of them even the well placed in-content ad is much lower as well the the CPC. I have tested this extensively.
> I also ran a Minecraft mods site for awhile with my son and at its top it made $9k/mo
Congratulations. That is pretty impressive, and you repeated he success twice. Do you still run those? Is that your full time job?
> When you place multiple ads, the CTR on all of them even the well placed in-content ad is much lower as well the the CPC.
Wouldn't you still come out ahead because with more ads you get more impressions? Isn't that how it works and why you see sites with 1000000 ads?
I shut down the Minecraft site about 6 months ago. Traffic also plummeted being that mods are not as popular because lots of the kids are now playing Minecraft with the app or consoles.
It's not my full-time job. It's always been more of a side thing. I don't think I would be able to sleep at night if it were my full-time job. Way too much risk with it.
"Wouldn't you still come out ahead because with more ads you get more impressions?"
You would think but actually no at least not for all of the tests I did and I did a lot of them. You don't really make your $$ from impressions. You make $$ when people click on your ads. If the ads that are displayed are very relevant and your CTR is really good, you make more money.
I'd think with the increasing popularity of Netflix that'd still be popular as well.
Yes, Netflix is still popular but they were not pushing as many display ads as they once were when the site was doing its best. Plus the TV show line up sucked after that summer and nothing really was sticking. After taking into account the cost to hire and manage contract TV show writers, cost to advertise it, hosting, etc. the revenue it was making wasn't enough for it to be worthwhile. Especially considering our SaaS products and Advertising Agency were growing.
Which is, I guess, because the youth is more susceptible to ads.
:(
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.
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.
I think there's a strong desire for the whole "build a huge audience for your free product, then monetise somehow" model to be valid still (if it ever actually was). Because it's easy, I think.
The fact that it doesn't actually work any more is upsetting to people. So they downvote. That's my guess anyway.
Not that you'll be able to read this, because this post is about to be downvoted to oblivion too ;)
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: send a targeted email promo to users based on their analytics data, ads on the pages, etc.
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...
I once managed another project that had about 14m visits/mo and made a meager $3000. Bad target demographic.
How did the costs of running the 14m vists/mo compare to http://zty.pe? Different times, and probably different kind of site, but did the experience change the types of applications you tried to build?
The project with the 14m visits/mo generated 700tb of traffic and required half a dozen servers. Cost was around $2000/mo with traffic being the most expensive part. (I complained about traffic costs with cloud hosters a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11301085)
I tried to bookmark it by hitting command-D (in Safari on a Mac), but since you capture all keystrokes, I couldn't bookmark it. Perhaps you'd see a bump in your numbers if you allowed command-D through?
Windows, Chrome, bookmarking seems to work fine?
Should have a donate button on the page (because uBlock..). Edit: Or: Register to track progress over time with a login, for a low fixed(?) fee.
But I don't know how that would affect my likeliness to see the ad. To improve that, maybe add more natural pause points to the game, so people can have more chances to click?
P.S: This game is seriously fun!
On the weekends I upload videos for artists from my home country. I have one channel that is fairly popular. The artists themselves are not big enough to attract many people to their own channels so the use mine. We split the ad revenue. I pay them locally. My take home after deductions is anywhere from 5k to 8k per quarter.
EDIT: added payout period. I give payouts per quarter because as i said, they are not big artists, so it would be tedious sending small amounts to tons of people each month.
Some other artists already had channels, so they were hesitant, so i approached some of them and tried to explain momentum. They didn't understand either, so I took the same material they had on their channels and put it up then gave them the reports and checks at the end of the month as well. Then they understood it would be tough to go it alone. From there onward, it was much easier getting artists to post on the channel.
I am now looking for ways to move the thing forward. I am getting to a point where I have too many uploads which sometimes dilutes the attention, so I might open another channel. Unfortunately I am not large enough to manage other personal channels as a small MCN.
I think it's common on sites like HN for us to see your original post and think "he uploads videos and gets how much?" But it's the backstory that's interesting. What events led you to have this unique opportunity that you are now capitalizing on.
I think it's common on sites like HN for us to see your original post and think "he uploads videos and gets how much?" But it's the backstory that's interesting. What events led you to have this unique opportunity that you are now capitalizing on.
The key aspect to estimate how much you can earn is the page RPM you can get.
The average I have seen across my sits is around $2. Some niches have lower RPMs (e.g., programming, in my case at least). Some niches have much higher. I had a site about investing in gold that had $12 page RPM on average, if I remember well.
In your case, I believe the number would be higher than $2000 per month if you reach 1 million visitors. I am guessing twice as much at least.
Since then, I tried to activate ads via disqus comments but their revenue program seems like you have to be selected first in order to earn money. What would you recommend to monetize a tech blog ? (at least to cover the hosting fees)
Adsense revenue accounted to half of my monthly revenue ($100) 4 years ago. Nowadays, thanks to adblockers, it's only 10% of it and my monthly revenue is down to $50. Most of my revenue comes from a direct ad that adblockers can't detect.
Adsense is dead to small publishers.
I have always done better with getting cash from my audience than with ads. I used to have donate buttons on my sites, but at some point I switched to a tip jar and my take improved. Instructions how to make a pay pal tip jar can be found here (on my website):
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-...
Google is your friend
It has slowly declined down to tens of thousands of visits per month, which comes out to around $15-30/mo.
I really didn't want to try and monetize it for too long and ultimately regretted not slapping a simple clean ad on it earlier. Could have made more with more non-exclusive ads but it was about right for the amount of effort it took (very little). Not bad for a completely unattended service with zero overhead.
+ I have learned about delays in click detection on mobile
I have created http://morebeer.today some time ago and I was waiting for more visitors before I include some ads.
Based on the discussion it looks that no content -> garbage ads -> it doesn't make sense to introduce ads. Also 1$/1k views is not realistic. Should I rather try to figure out what would be good affiliate links?
Neither is designed with monetization in mind. I just threw some ads on them to cover the hosting costs (the pi Searcher needs a few gigs of RAM) -- but it turned out that learning about the ad ecosystem was pretty interesting.
Another site (http://coincollector.org) was making $300/month as long as I kept posting but after several years I grew tired and now it earns next to nothing.