

Ask HN: Can you Monetize Celebrity Gossip Sites? - DanielBMarkham

So I've got this blog that I've been writing in for over four years.<p>As part of that, a few of my pages have pictures of celebrities. What can I say? Seemed like a fun topic at the time.<p>These pages, for whatever reason, have become very popular -- so popular that they take up a considerable amount of bandwidth off my server. I'm probably spending 20 bucks a month to pay for people to come by and gawk at celebrity pictures.<p>I'm at a loss at how to continue. While traffic is nice, quite frankly these people are visiting for reasons unrelated to technology, humor, agile, or any of the other things I like talking about. They come once, see the pictures, then never come again. Hardly any ever stay. And they're not providing anything except a bill.<p>What to do? Delete those pages? Re-write them as landing pages for some kind of product? How do these celebrity sites work, anyway?<p>People say to get traffic first and then worry about the money, but what happens when the traffic you get isn't what you expected? Change the site over to something like "Naked Famous People" ?? &#60;- Not happening.
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jacquesm
Are they real page views or picture embeds ?

How much of it is bot traffic ?

Slap some google ads on them, $20 / month is < $1 / day, that shouldn't be too
hard to do.

Naked famous people is a lot better business model than some of the ones I
read about, but at the same time it may involve a lawyer or two.

Celebrity sites usually are bottom feeders, I don't think you want to be
associated with them in any way shape or form.

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DanielBMarkham
They're real page views. In the logs I get referrals from Google, usually
people doing image searches.

I've got Google ads at the top of every page, but I'm not converting much of
anything from the gawkers.

I was wondering if there was some magic -- perhaps making those pages static
and rewriting them targeted just at celebrity peepers -- that would help
recoup expenses? I figure these sites that just do celebrity gossip and
pictures and such must be making money somehow.

I don't think text-based ads, like adwords, are going be effective for people
who are primarily searching for visual stimulus. Perhaps some kind of landing
page for a paid celebrity site that gives referral fees? I don't know. I'm not
crazy about this entire business, and if it weren't for the bandwidth cost,
I'd just ignore it. But I'm increasingly uncomfortable with paying out so much
each month and getting nothing from it.

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jacquesm
Ok.

I agree with you on the text links, but if it was just to recoup the costs
that should do it without any real work on your end.

I don't see how rewriting the pages is going to help recoup expenses, that
just costs time and does not bring any cash.

Yes, celebrity sites make money, but they are also the shadiest operators when
it comes to SEO, then there is the 'legal' angle.

Referral fees are usually only for sites that turn a buck, you do not wish to
be seen linking to that kind of content.

It's one excellent way to kill your reputation, both 'online' in terms of PR
and offline.

Maybe you could make a deal with a single website that targets the same
demographic as the one that you seem to be attracting and place a single
banner or such for a fixed fee per month.

<http://www.affiliateranker.com/directory/>

has some candidates, but it will take you a while to find something that works
well. A/B testing is the key to getting an affiliate program that converts
well.

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DanielBMarkham
Yeah that was the answer I was afraid of. Dozens of hours spent trying to save
20 bucks. I might just delete the pages.

I agree that I don't want to get into the naked famous people biz. But being a
normal person and not trying to have a tightly targeted blog means that these
images are going to be part of what I like writing about from time to time.
Which presents a quandary.

It would be neat if somebody could write an app that let people put up
pictures of famous people as part of their blog articles and then have the
pictures "expire" after a month or so. Visitors after that would have to log-
in/pay/be-annoyed in order to retrieve them. I think this would allow
publishers the ability to use images freely while not accumulating a lot of
junk traffic.

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jacquesm
So how about simply adding those pages to your robots.txt file ?

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DanielBMarkham
Awesome.

That was the simple solution I was looking for. Add it to robots.txt, google
drops the page from it's index, random searchers go elsewhere, and Bob's your
uncle.

Doh!

It's amazing how bouncing problems off other people can lead to simple
solutions. That's probably best-kept secret of HN -- using "Ask HN" articles

~~~
jacquesm
You're welcome. I wished my own current Ask HN post would get some traction,
if not I'll have to break out the C compiler :)

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jsz0
Do you own the photographs? or the rights to reproduce them? If you do not I
suspect monetizing your site will put you into some legal danger.

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jakewolf
Start by changing the anti aging ads on your blog to something your target
readership would be interested in.

