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Ask HN: I own a niche image upload site with 400k uniques but now what?

9 points by hahla ↗ HN
Hey everyone, I've owned reversegif.com for almost two years now. Its an awesome app that lets you upload and reverse animated gifs. The site is by far the community favorite, and has been pulling in 400k uniques per month steadily for the last two years.

Its serves such a niche purpose I don't know where to take it from here. Financially the site performs poorly - barely covering hosting on a month to month basis. But I want to utilize the traffic and add more features that would bring the community value but I dont know where to go from here.

Thoughts?

13 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] thread
dethstar
Ask the community for feedback. I think adding a "don't reverse" checkbox while against the whole point could make people host their gifs there, even if they don't want it reverted.
hahla
Looking at the analytics, most of the users are redditors which by default use imgur to host any images including gifs. With that said we do have a feature to unreverse gifs so while viewing a reversegif, you can simply click on it to revert back to the original.
t0
Freemium? Imgur is evidence users will pay for extra features and support you.
[deleted]
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vasco
You have one ad position right now that I can see. Increase that so you can cover hosting without problems. Maybe allow people to pay an annual fee to remove ads and have more storage space or whatever.
imtu80
It's time to exit and move on to next idea. Sell your site before somebody creates a clone.
vldx
@OP - if you're considering such idea - hit me up :)
hahla
I would be interested in selling - email is in my profile.
captainbenises
I think you can monetize it more than the hosting costs. More ads, better positioned.

Ahh, but your traffic is all from reddit, so maybe not. Damn adblockers.

thenomad
Are your uniques coming from page views, or just image views?

If people are actually viewing the pages, there's a lot you can do to increase revenue.

If they're just linking hosted gifs directly, though, that's a harder problem.

hahla
Thats 400k uniques, pageviews are a bit higher. All of the users actually view the pages as we dont allow gifs to be viewed / hotlinked directly.
thenomad
Aha.

In that case, I'd strongly advise more than one ad per page. 2-3 is good.

If you can, run 'em through Google Adsense: I don't know what you're using at the moment but Adsense has consistently been the highest performer for me, CPM-wise, short of running my own direct-sold ads.

And do test different layouts. I've found that changing ad layout on a page can literally be a 10x multiplier on ad income.

livestyle
You should email me tom at buysellads.com

We help thousands of pubs sell self serve ads to contextually relevant advertisers.

We are also bootstrapped and love indie pubs.