Ask HN: I made $1.01 yesterday. What next?
It was just sitting there, doing nothing and I couldn't stand it. So I thought why not put some web games on it?
So I coded... and coded ... and coded ... and by 3AM I had a page, with a database that linked up a bunch of games that were declared "embeddable" by their owner (addictinggames.com).
Tuesday, it made $0.50 on Adsense. Yesterday $1.01.
Now if only I were able to scale that up by about 80 times (using only part time labor) and I'd be able to 'take the pay cut' so I could switch into scaling it up by about 200 times for a great big raise!
Reading HN has really opened my eyes to the fact that the internet is made by people. It doesn't have to be created by corporations - but it's something that anyone can do. Holy Crap! Even me.
I just checked my profile and I've been a Hacker News reader for 94 days. With the income I've earned from this project, that's an income of over a penny a day so far... Let's see if I can ramp that up?
I want to put some time into improving the technology. Initially I was loading a random list of about 1000 games - but I've changed that to show the games sorted by order or user rank.
I've also got game tag and category data - so I can add navigation, maybe a fun, self updating 'active search' type of thing (I'm already loading the games via ajax)
I'd like to pull from other games sources - many of the big games sites allow you to host their games (since they get the linkback on the flash load screen)
Some even have revenue sharing on the ads inside the game as well.
The page desperately needs to be optimized in terms of adsense placement. I'm getting a 1.5% CTR and I've got friends who have shown me placements that they earn 30% off of. He tells me he's got optimizations that earn him 70% CTR.
I'd also like to redesign (again) so it looks a little more polished and professional. So far it's really just a ~8 hour hack job and ugly.
But earning a dollar on the first day? That's a bit encouraging. I'd love to make a real, sustainable 'gig' out of running a games site (or any site for that matter) ...
I really think HackerNews might be the type of place that has the advice I need (and might be able to warn me off of some of the pitfalls I might run into).
Anything you can tell me would be greatly appreciated (a hell of a lot cheaper than an MBA program ;).
99 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadI can help if lookin into gaming revenue.
jimmy@inodesoft.com
Cache those images on your front page, then stitch them together into a big sprite and then use CSS to display the specific image from the sprite. It'll greatly decrease the load time on that page.
Ref: http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/
I'm going to put it on the list as one of my priorities. I think improving / creating a navigation system where players can find a game by category, tag or genre is a higher priority (though I could be wrong)
I'm also hoping to add a game description and * star rating to the mouse over tooltip.
I think if users can find the game they want to play - they might forgive load time (though I could very well be wrong).
Maybe I should put fewer games on the front page? (I do like having a lot of squares to look at, it makes it seem more fun to me)
but you're absoloutely right. load time with a star beside it - right there on my TODO list :)
1.5% CTR is pretty good for Adsense. If you can get it up to 5%, consider yourself lucky.
http://fstr.net
I'm honestly thinking of just putting an <!//--[if IE]-- sorry this website is not supported in IE, but here's an animated gif of a dancing bear for your amusement ---!>
around the entire site.
Alternatively, a hand-picked selection of games is more value to me as a visitor, than if you had every flash game in the universe embedded on that page. No one has the time to play all those. Choosing which ones are worthy of wasting your time is the hardest part.
Ratings and comments "incoming" - on the list. There's a lot of feedback on here so It's going to take me a few days to prioritize everything.
Facebook comments are quick though. I've done that before.
Create value, make users want to stick around, iterate, grow.
If this can make $1 in 1 day on an evening's work, how far can I get if it's actually a GOOD site?
Feedback from where people see the areas of concern is useful. I've already read "Load time" in the comments as well as "game quality" and "exclusive content"
Load time is one thing I'd not considered. I think the images must load quickly for me because I've got them all in my browser cache.
I've changed the default sort order of the games so you're much less likely to get 'crap' on your first click than you were when they were random - but I'm working on adding categories as we speak, that way people will be able to find their genre quickly.
Thanks for the feedback :)
if everyone is coming in from search, it depends how many people are searching.
I have a few content sites that drive about $10CPM, but even with #1 organic ranking, I'm limited to about 1500 visitors a month. 95% of my traffic is from search. 99% of my revenue is from people that found my site from search.
generally, as far as adsense goes, the common wisdom is that repeat users do not drive advertising revenue. it's the search hoppers that are the ones that often click on the ads. making the site sticky doesn't necessarily mean more adsense revenue, and here is probably where other advertising mechanisms that require high number of impressions would start to come into play.
affiliate marketing might be something to look into as a supplemental as well, although i'm not sure what that is in your market.
(On the other hand, the site is self-sustaining; I don't have to think about it much.)
In response to FreeRadical: It's all about the point of diminishing returns. I spent 6 years on my first site, and it's a huge amount of work with literally thousands of manhours put into it. Just a month ago I launched another site, intended to be a minimum viable product that I can just develop and leave, and it's working out OK thus far. Don't get me wrong, the first is very much successful (2MM+ pageviews a month), but that's thousands of hours I could have put into making multiple other sites, each making a lot less but relatively more.
How?
I'd really like to see the stats on that.
Every time someone tells me that they spent (small amount of hours) on a website that (makes more than $1 a day) they are exaggerating to the extreme by not including advertising, hosting, domain expenses and maintenance time.
1) I met someone who is running a site that took him a few hours to build, cents to run (AppEngine) (plus $20 for two domain names) and makes over $1000/month (yeah, so he's spent more time since then, but not much.)
2) I build a site that cost me $15 to build ($10 domain hosting, $5 - refundable - to join an affiliate program), hours to build (it's basically a blog on Wordpress) and makes me nearly $200/month.
I can't say I'm an expert, but one way to duplicate this is to find a vertical problem domain with a lot of interest (ie, busy forums), find some problem they have (often it's some kind of calculation that people always have trouble with) and build a crappy, ugly tool to do it for them. Make the calculation URL addressable, then put a short note in a forum saying what you've done and follow up by using it in a few discussions.
Not much in in Javascript - just the part that displays the ad. All the intelligence is on the server, mostly in Java.
If you are dealing with physical products then affiliate programs can work quite well.
Edit: On my friend's site is is all AdSense. His is non-physical product related.
A while back there was this post about launching a minimally viable product in 3 hours. http://blog.amirkhella.com/2010/09/21/the-story-of-keynotopi... 3 hours and he's making money! What am I doing wrong?
Nothing. Take a look around his site. He is already an extensive expert in the field of user experience, with numerous successes under his belt. I am sure those successes were the product of a lot of education and years and years of hard work. He already has quite a following on his blog due to those successes. There was a lot that went on before he could start marketing something and sell it right off the bat.
Last summer I saw Michael Franti in concert. You may know him as the overnight success that had the song "Say Hey" if you listen to pop radio at all. (It has been in numerous TV shows, a Corona commercial, It was one of the songs played during Oprah's last show, etc.) I happen to know him as an artist who traveled from festival to festival year in and year out. Sometimes playing to a couple hundred people. Even before success, he was a world traveler, has played with indigenous people in the bush of third world countries with no electricity. He was a successful spoken word performer and has been in several bands that rose and fell long before he current lineup. I think he had released about 10 or 11 albums with various groups with virtually no mainstream success before the album that included Say Hey. At the concert I saw him at, he mentioned the press he was getting at being an overnight success and added, "yeah, with 20 years in the making."
So I guess you could say that Michael probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars for singing that 3 minute song. But there was a lot that went on in his life to get him there.
How are you driving visitors to the site currently?
:D ummm. ycombinator
I read another comment about reddit / stumble / digg / etc... So I'll have to go there next. For today, once I get tag-navigation done (it's looking pretty sweet already) then I guess a reddit submission.
Since I regularly read reddit I'll feel a little more comfortable with the community there. Hopefully they'll be as supportive as HN is :)
I really do feel nervous about making sure people like it, and making sure it's good enough to show off.
Showing work in progress to HN is a bit of a different story because we're all such "doers" around here. I guess I just feel "safer" starting here. (if that makes sense?)
I fucking hate SEO. I've spent well over 100k hiring and firing contractors from around the world. I've worked with some of the biggest names in SEO down to the most unknown people in India. We spend a lot of time trying to manipulate search engines to work the way we want them and it's all a game. If i were in your position i'd focus around creating content people WANT to use and leverage communities like this to help figure out how to improve them so WE market the product for you (this isn't easy though - you have to be EXCEPTIONAL). General SEO/SEM tactics are good to know and practice, but i really believe the best/most sustainable approach to a successful site is creating something people actually want and are willing to tell their friends about. Don't let this bit of discourage you, create something great!
- Start growing a player community(which is how Kongregate works)
- Place more extreme filters on quality or genre(this is the basis of sites like physicsgames.net).
- Invest in some exclusive content. This is expensive and probably a bad idea at the early stage, but the fastest way to get started is to go onto FlashGameLicense and browse the stuff that's up for bid or auction.
I would suggest taking some time to figure out your focus before you go too deeply into the site optimization, else you'll build the wrong thing.
After all, after friends and family finish checking it out, who do I have left? Everything gets a 'blip' at the start with your first facebook post "he friends, check it out" then trickle until search engines find you.
I wrote a game for KONG once. I like how it works there. (http://www.kongregate.com/games/lythrdskynrd/dizzy-ship)
There is a question of the value of sponsored game traffic VS a good PPC campaign. What point do you decide it's worth throwing a few hundred down on a sponsorship? I'm not sure :)
Adsense pubs who make good money have sites that get a veritable shit ton of traffic every day, or have sites with ads with incredibly high CPC amounts
(EDIT: for anyone who doesn't get the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park))
Side note: I have no problem with the OP's website.
The things we build aren't always about what the internet needs, but maybe there's some value in starting small and building it into something great.
I'm not trying to dominate the universe of flash game websites - but I I am utterly fascinated by the idea of earning my living and being completely in control of my own destiny.
In my background I've worked for a mega-corporation (Nortel Networks, they're like Cisco systems, only bankrupt) and I've worked as a public employee (high school teacher). Nowadays I work for a smaller 40 person company ... but I'm still not my own boss.
This is an entirely new concept to me. I can create value and sell it directly and I can do it according to my own rules...
I 100% appreciate that this is "just another half assed flash site". I just built it to see if I could. But it made $0.50 on day one and $1.01 on day two.
So maybe there's something here.
If this does fizzle, at least I'll have learned something. Whatever I do pick up from this experience, I will be able to take to my next project. If this one doesn't "take" then maybe my next one will.
Or maybe by sharing the experience with HN we'll all learn something. Maybe I'll make a contact with someone who's similarly minded and we'll team up to make a project that ends up being better than either of us could have done on our own.
Who knows?
You're 100% right though - i mean it - the internet does not need "yet another crappy flash games site" ... it's a hell of a lot better than a page-park though http://thegames.com/
Yeah it's a mindblow when you realize this. But it's not made of people who spend 6 hours a night watching tv.
There has never been a better time for creators, of all kind.
Where's the difference to all the YouTube junkies who spend hours watching YT?
That's why I always try to be as entertaining as possible (while still being clear and helping them solve my problem). I recently had to exchange a pair of pants that I really liked but didn't fit on an online store. I ended up describing receiving their pants "As if the mighty Norse god Thor himself rode down from Aesir with a lightning bolt in one hand and these pants in the other."
I figure their lives are hard enough, might as well make them smile sometimes.
So now, every christmas, I find some of the services I use (like my bank, full of VERY helpful, friendly people) who have call centres active on Christmas day, and I ring them and say thanks and Merry Christmas.
The only downside is occasionally someone will cry because a random stranger wished them a Merry Christmas because they're at work.
http://playtomic.com/games/catalog
You can pull it all in via script through the very customizable feed:
http://playtomic.com/games/feed
Portals are a lot of work though. You'll need a strategy - find keywords you want to target, optimize and build links towards them etc.
You can also license games through http://www.flashgamelicense.com/ which gets your branding in games and funnels traffic back to you.
I mean that.
I've been working all day and have just uploaded a whack of improvements
- categories now implemented - adsense moved around (hopefully) optimized a bit for clickyness
I've actually taken some ads off the page - but I'm really interested in finding more content. At the moment, I've just been using http://addictinggames.com (bless him, plug plug)
But more sites and content will make my place much better. I'm especially in love with embeddable!
I've been going at it solid since my OP without a break - so I've got to step away for a little - but I'll definitely take advantage of this :)
What I suggest is getting a Facebook fanpage up, and corral all your friends. You could get a following for your site that will revisit it again and again.
Good luck, and nice work!
I'm learning web programming, trying to start up little sites. Please leave me your email or drop a line: nleschov at gmail
I'd change the URL structure from numeric to keyword bases (happy to help with apache config if you like).
I'd also provide a search box, powered by google search so you can still get ad clicks. Add an addthis.com button to each page to build backlinks and virality.
I've upgraded to adding TAGS & Categories for links - but am still stuck with numbers on the games codes. I think you might be right though, in terms of SEO that will improve value.
Unfortunately, at the moment, I'm populating the game page via ajax so google won't really know what pages I've got on there until after I follow up with those recommendations of yours.
I think it's good advice though.
for memorability but also hugely important for SEO.
What were the traffic sources?
You might be able to do more targeted advertising to bring in more users, although that would obviously cut into your meager earnings at this point.
Anyways, good on you for executing on an idea! Many people don't even get to that point.
I'd actually just announced the earnings (as I wanted to share) - but my ignorance of their policy in this respect has given way to caution.
I've deleted the post where I say the exact $ value of the earnings and instead will just say that it's managed to buy a pizza dinner.
I like the colors - but the bevel is low quality. I'll have to make an effort on the logo in round 2. :)