Ask HN: Who runs a small/medium website supported by ads?
Facebook, Twitter, TikTok are all ad-supported and that is viable because they have huge userbases.
How viable is it for small/medium websites to be supported by ads? I'm interested in any examples people have and even more interested by any HN'ers doing this.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 98.1 ms ] threadOn a personal note, I tried getting into ads for one of my personal projects (a map of recycling points for my hometown), but Google declined my application because it doesn't have much content on it — though it's kind of absurd because people use my web app, to find locations on the map, not read content. I ended up not doing ads for now, and keep receiving "buy me a coffee" donations.
Is that enough to support the site? How does that work with tax? Are those people considered paying users or is it like tips. Do you pay tax on tips?
I basically send an invoice for each tip I receive. Talked a lot to my accountant about this, and she said that if I don't invoice the people sending me these tips, I'm doing fraud, and can pay huge fines once I get caught. I think only as an NGO you're allowed to receive tips w/o paying taxes on the amount. I have an LLC, so I have to invoice every income.
If you're in the U.S. though...you need to find a new accountant. You don't need to invoice every transaction. It certainly is advisable, for accounting/auditing purposes (much easier to track and verify income), but it's not mandated.
I guess something like this:
Personal - tens of views a month
Micro - hundreds of views a month
Small - thousands of views a month
Medium - hundreds of thousands of views a month
Large - millions of views a month
X-Large - 10s of millions of views a month
XX-large - .. you get the idea
Huge - Twitter, Facebook, etc
My website is aimed at older children (education), it's no-code Bubble.io and I use google adsense to drive revenue. It _just about_ balances as cost neutral to operate. I do not update any content any more often than once every 3-5 years.
Just because the cost neutral could mean a few dollars (static) to a few hundreds.
At around 3-5k users a day things start to get interesting.
At what point is it worth creating a self-serve platform for advertisers? Or is that not useful at all?
Put a link to advertise here and manually manage it until you have too many ads to manage yourself.
It's not really "viable". This may be because of the industry it's in, which doesn't really purchase online advertising, and therefore cuts into the overall earnings potential.
I run it for fun and for certain incidental benefits, not for the $$$
Luckily the revenue wasn't enough for them to quit their job and do it full time, but it was still a financial blow.
I guess my point is: Ad supported is a nice idea, but it makes you very vulnerable to the big ad network(s). Even if you do everything right, if some automated system decides you did something wrong, click, you're gone. I've read stories about competitors hiring click-bots to click on ads until you get banned, and while I don't think that is what happened in the above case, it is another thing to be paranoid about.
I knew I’d done nothing wrong, but there was nothing I could do to prove it to Google. Nor did they provide any useful info on what I’d done wrong.
This was the first experience I had of the perils of Big Tech monopolies holding the keys to entire sectors. Once they shut you out it’s game over.
Since then I’ve not found another decent ad provider. There are loads of awful ones that hit your users with deceptive and obtrusive ads. I just want banner ads, like Adsense served.
Any suggestions appreciated.
This is the type of thing I was interested in learning about. So if I have 50,000 monthly visits with people using around 25 pages per visit, and I show 1 ad per page.. it would generate $945.00 per annum. Ouch!
https://www.google.com/adsense/start/#calculator
Hacker News is famously run on 2 boxes. And that is without Cloudflare + CDNs to cache static requests: static websites are practically free. Domains are cheap as well, even a .com domain costs $20/yr and domains like .xyz cost <$5/yr. The cheapest linode cloud server costs $5/month. Idk how much ad revenue pays out but I imagine it can recover those costs.
However, you probably won't profit from ad revenue, and it definitely won't sustain a full income.
I'd like to hear specific cases if anyone wants to share
And if Google Adsense pays you 50%, you end up with $5 RPM (revenue per mille) for your website.
I think this is similar for Youtube, except those are video ads, I remember seeing "this is how much I made from Youtube" and those were roughly $5-ish RPM and much higher for niche channels like finance etc.
Shepherd is a book discovery platform, still in baby stages and adding genres this winter!
I want to drop display ads eventually and replace it with in house book ads… but that is a big project, hopefully 2024.
Side note: I had to laugh when it recommended "The Little Engine That Could" because I looked up "The Hobbit"
Very cool, where did it recommend The Little Engine That Could via the Hobbit? Very curious :)
It was a website from Jonathan Harris w/ stories from people all over the world.
The way you link books together reminded a lot of that (places, topics, etc...).
Thanks! Ya I am basically trying to gather a lot of 5 book groupings around mood, theme, and topic (and eventually others). And, use that to help people bump into books better, and find them based on human groupings...
You can still kind of see something at the archive -> https://web.archive.org/web/20190511074620/http://cowbird.co...
>based on human groupings
Yes, that exactly.
I hope you can get some inspiration out of it :)
I run https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ with a friend; it takes a lot of her time to code it, and make sure it is working efficiently, and can scale during big outages on the net. Plus, expand it to offer more data on where outages are happening and what they are. She is a senior dev ops so it needs to be worth her time. I spend my time building out new sites to check, adding FAQ items, and generally all odds and ends to keep it going. My time isn't cheap either.
I run https://shepherd.com/ which is a new site trying to help readers explore and discover books while helping authors connect with new readers. It is not cheap to build, the backend is Django/Python and custom, so I have an amazing part-time freelance developer I work with, a fantastic designer I work with part-time, a part-time editor to do editing with authors on each submission, a full-time person to help me with emails and keep on track of things, and several people helping with data on the books.
Does that help illustrate?
We sell and host our own advertising which are static images. No ad network for the last 7-8 years.
The goal is to match the ads to the content and have the content be curated so that only people who care about the content would be interested in the ads.
It’s relatively easy to setup and monetizes much better than a lot of things.
One other hack - AdSense may limit the number of ads per page, but you can also add in niche networks to increase your ads / page. This was 10 years ago, but I found the best option to be 2x AdSense per page, + 1 niche network. The niche network gave about 25% as much revenue as the 2 AdSense units combined - lower return but was still free money.
The viability of this business model has been somewhat dented recently by multiple Google algo updates. Many operators were buying expired domains, scraping People Also Ask questions in bulk from SERPs, and using GPT-3 to create prettily-worded but factually-questionable answers, on a massive scale. The algo changes aimed at these sites (and other types of SEO spam), which in some cases would have been generating six figures monthly, also seem to have taken out many legitimate sites.
Ads pay for everything there even though something like 55% of people use an ad blocker. My partner has been really improving it and adding user reported issues and slowly going to get more data into the pages.