

Ask HN: How can non-subscription based website make money? - satishf

Can it generate enough money from ads to sustain itself.
======
adw
Everything makes money by selling something, whether directly or indirectly.

There are something like five things you can sell via or over the Web:

i) sell products which you buy or make yourself (ecommerce)

ii) sell services which you generate (x-as-a-Service)

iii) resell other people's products or services on commission (affiliate
marketing)

iv) sell your audience's attention (advertising)

v) sell your audience's behaviour (usually to advertisers or publishers so
_they_ can sell more advertising – behavioural targeting)

That's what you've got. Only two of these directly require you to take
payment, but they're the easy ones to understand...

~~~
mseebach
vi) be a loss-leader for something else.

In the case of a personal websites, that something else might your career,
raising your profile to potential employers/contracting clients.

It's not strictly making money itself, but in the long run, it might have a
very decent ROI.

~~~
adw
Sure, but in that case, the website is a marketing campaign for something
else, not a product. (We're not disagreeing, really, it just depends on how
you're setting the scope.)

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endlessvoid94
I run ThatHigh.com and it pays my rent in SF.

I started out with Adsense and it scales pretty well. I now have two direct
advertisers paying me monthly.

So basically, it's ad-driven. And that model can definitely work.

~~~
rwhitman
When did you start the site? At what point did you start realizing that
Adsense was scaling well?

Just really curious to hear your story.

~~~
endlessvoid94
I started the site with my friend and my girlfriend back in February while I
was still in college. It took off.

Like I said below, I only got direct advertisers in July, so it took awhile to
grow. I was making about $1200 / month from Adsense in May/June, and some of
the space has been sold to direct advertisers and I still make about $900 /
month just from adsense, plus more from the advertisers.

I'm still looking for more, but the project has taken a backseat to my new
project: Djangy.com

~~~
rwhitman
Did most of the direct advertisers come to you, or did you actively look for
them?

I've seen the link shared by friends before, is most of your traffic just
organic/viral link sharing?

~~~
endlessvoid94
I basically went and bought a High Times magazine and contacted every. single.
company. that advertised in the issue I had.

I got a handful of responses, and one of them took a chance and gave me $X to
try it out. I'm still waiting to hear if he wants to continue advertising.

The other one took longer to get, but I'm sending a significant amount of
traffic their away and they're seeing revenue from the traffic, so it will
likely continue.

RE: traffic -- My visitors are by FAR mostly coming directly. Which is a great
position to be in. The other misc. Facebook was an early source, but not very
high (no pun intended). Once I added "like" buttons to each story, facebook
skyrocketed to the number 2 traffic referrer. Then there is traffic from
StumbleUpon, twitter, a few blogs, and lastly organic search. But the search
keywords are mostly just "that high", nothing outside the name of the site.

I'm sure there is a TON I could do to get more visitors. I would like to focus
on it more and turn it into something that makes alot more money than it
currently does. I know if I put some more time into it, it could make a ton of
money, I just have to grow it, and that takes time.

------
leviathant
Sell site merchandise, if applicable. I don't mean using Cafe press, I mean do
a survey of your viewers and ask if they'd be interested, take the number of
"yes" votes and halve that, and if you've got more than, say, 50, do a run of
tshirts based on the sizes in the survey you put out. Make sure you have a
quality design, make sure the tshirt printer shows you a proof before you give
the go on the large batch, then put it on your credit card, and sell the
shirts. A one color print job on a single side of a decent shirt will run you
$5-7 USD, and you can sell them for $15-$30, depending on a number of factors.

Before affiliating with eBay and Amazon, I would do a fund drive every couple
of years. You know, "Hey, we've got 80,000 monthly unique viewers, if every
one of you pitched in a quarter, I'll never bug you about cash again." Asking
for donations once every two years is much more effective than leaving up a
'donate' paypal button, in my experience.

eBay and Amazon have easy to use APIs that can generate affiliate links which
can bring income. You can either build out a merch page a la
<http://theninhotline.net/features/merch/> or if you're writing about stuff
that might have related reading (or in my case, music) link to stuff on Amazon
within your content every now and then.

Having said that, don't make a post just so you can link to Amazon. Don't let
your affiliation drive your content. But if you think linking to a book might
genuinely be interesting to your audience, do it, and use an affiliate link.

I look at ads as a last resort, but that's because I'm odd. I've only rarely
put ads on my site, and only on a direct-sale kind of thing. MTV contacted me
asking me if I could link to something of theirs, I wrote back and asked for
what I thought was a reasonable price (based off what I made in Amazon and
eBay) and they agreed to pay for the link, which I had creative control over,
and which featured in my sidebar for a month.

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patio11
Sell things to people for money.

~~~
chc
This is both the obvious way and usually the best way to earn money. Don't
forget that this includes selling other people's things through affiliate
programs.

------
terra_t
How much you make on ads depends on your site, your audience, and all that.

Looking at quite a few sites, I see results that are counterintuitive: for
instance, you can make more money running ads on a Chevy forum than you can on
a Cadillac forum.

You might think that Caddy owners have more money than Chevy owners, however,
it turns out that Chevy owners like to trick out their cars with aftermarket
parts and Caddy owners (even poor owners of 20-year old Cadillacs) like to
have OEM everything... Most of the ad spend is on aftermarket parts... GM
isn't going to spend money on caddy forums because the people on Caddy forums
know more about GM's products and GM's product plans than the people who make
the ads.

I think it's also about supply and demand. Even though people spend a lot on
cars, car products and car services, my experience is that there are a lot of
topics that pay better than cars. The trouble is that there are too many car
sites out there already, so the spend gets diluted Every gearhead and his
brother has a web site about cars.

You've got to watch out for "otaku topics" like Anime. Unfortunately, anime
fans are weirdos (the kind of ~guys~ who dress up like a purple-haired
princess for Halloween) who don't spend a lot of money on stuff, and
particularly don't spend a lot on anime because they download it all off
bittorrent long before commercial dubbers start negotiating for the rights.
2/3 of the people who like anime already have a website or a livejournal or
deviantart page about it, so talk about dilution... Christ, you can't pay for
the storage and bandwidth costs for your images...

------
devmonk
Some ideas:

\- Bill on a per-use basis

\- Hours of usage are prepaid like calling cards

\- Ads

\- Selling data collected to others (and it doesn't even have to be personally
identifying customer info. I worked for a company that did speed tests and at
one point a company in another country that knew of our speed tests wanted to
buy our speed test result data. We never sold it, but sometimes offers come to
you!)

\- Donations (via paypal, etc.)

Can it generate enough money from Ads? Not as well as it used to be able to,
but yes it is possible. Is it likely without much effort? Depends on amount
and kind of site traffic and content of the Ads.

You need to have confidence in what product or service you are selling,
though, and have a potential/real customer feedback loop setup from the
beginning. You shouldn't rely on Ads alone. If no one is coming to your site,
they won't click on the Ads.

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jggube
When you say "website", is it content-driven or a web application/tool? Either
way, ads would be a good (only?) option.

If it's content-driven, you can do premium content stuff (like eBooks,
downloadables, etc.)

And when you say "enough money," how much are we talking about? It's all
relative: the more traffic you get, the more money you get. I would focus on
growing your community and audience before even thinking about monetization.
Have that behind your head, of course, but you're not going to make money if
you don't have traffic or a community. You're not going to make anything
significant if your product sucks. Focus on the product first, the money will
come eventually. It's an investment of time and a bit of money (web hosting on
a VPS is like $20 a month and you just scale when you need to).

------
jon914
It really depends on the kind of business. If it's user-generated content,
you're going to have a tough time with ads.

Instead, you should talk with your customers (or potential customers) to see
what their needs and pains are and base your business model off of that
research.

------
satishf
Are we talking about Google Ads or accepting my own ads directly from vendors?
At what traffic rate, will I be in a position to get my own ads from vendors?
This will be a niche website.

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paulsingh
You could make money off of ads but you'll need some serious traffic (ideally,
within a niche) to command decent CPMs.

A better strategy (and one that I'm using on NotaryCRM.com) is to sell the
audience something else that's useful. In my case, notary publics get a free
listing in my directory but I try to sell them on a CRM system to make their
lives easier.

------
timmy_k
Can anyone provide some examples of businesses that have successfully used
more than one of these methods? We all know about Facebook, but let's look at
businesses who fall under the Radar.

I want to see what people say before I provide my example...

~~~
timmy_k
My answer is Woot.com... they sell the products of others in a very unique
method. Additionally, they sell the attention of their audience with
advertisements.

Interesting stuff!

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petervandijck
Yes, you can make enough money from ads if you have a lot of traffic.

~~~
richardhenry
You can also make enough money from ads if you have a targeted, niche
audience.

Don't underestimate that, if you're willing to put the effort in and do ad
sales.

~~~
mattew
Also, don't underestimate the effort it takes to do ad sales.

