Ask HN: Ad network for side projects that isn't ugly?
Hey all, I'm curious what people here generally use as an ad network for side projects? I have a site that gets a few thousand impressions/month and I'd like to make a little bit off of it to motivate me to work on it more.
My issue is, standard banner ads are really ugly. Do you all have any suggestions that allow me to control the styling a bit more so the ads actually fit into my website and are less obtrusive? I know I'll probably make a lot less this way but that's okay with me.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 37.5 ms ] threadQuick question, have you used it for side projects before, and if so how was your experience? It might be nice to try to launch a side project and monetize it with this, having a small amount of profit would make it a lot easier to justify some things I'd love to work on sometime.
You can get a feel for what you'll earn here[1]. Basically you earn 70% of the gross of what we charge advertisers (see advertiser pricing[2]). Keep in mind these are ad views which aren't quite the same as pageviews. They're a subset.
Ads are a straight-forward path to monetization but not always the best. If you can make a project work as SaaS or really make sponsorships work for you (this requires effort), those will definitely earn A LOT more money per pageview than ads. Ads require a lot of traffic to make them work well. Usually you want high tens to hundreds of thousands of pageviews per month.
From a what we look at for publishers (sites that show ads) perspective, we're usually looking for high quality dev-focused sites or projects that don't want to just show Google ads. Per ad, publishers will earn much more with us than Google display ads but if you want to stick 4-5 Google ads on your site, video ads, or the like we can't compete with that and we don't want our ads on sites that do that. Devs hate them. My email is in my bio if you want to discuss further.
Regardless, good luck on the projects!
[1]: https://www.ethicalads.io/publishers/calculator/ [2]: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/pricing/
It varies depending on your site, it can vary a lot, but you might get between $1 to $5 per thousand views.
If making your site ugly made you rich that would be one thing. If making your site ugly can pay for a Netflix membership that's another thing. That said, a site like that might cost $5 a month to run and it is possible it could cover your operating costs.
Currently, it's hard to justify working on anything new for it since it is just a helpful web-tool, there's really no future for it beyond making it slightly more helpful for people's niche use-case. On the other hand, I don't want to ruin it for a couple bucks a month, so I need to be really careful on how I do this.
(e.g. when I was at rock bottom in my life, my HELOC was maxxed out and I just rolled my car, I started what I expected to be a difficult job hunt so I created an 'application management system' and talking about that landed me a job at an AI company with my interview. Out of the experience writing that I've written a few intelligent assistants such as an RSS reader which shows me just the most interesting articles and an image sorter that lets me easily work with 800,000 images with Chinese metadata even though I don't really know Chinese.)
I'm building something that would be better to monetize through ads but I need something like instagram stories to fit well into my product. Couldn't find anything good.