

Ask HN: How does your site income break down? - vaksel

Percentage wise, I'm looking for something like this:<p><pre><code>  premium subscriptions - 15%
  adsense - 20%
  adbrite - 10% 
  t-shirts - 11%
  direct sales advertising - 5% 
  eBay affiliate program  - 3%
  Amazon affiliate program - 1%
  CJ affiliate programs - 1%</code></pre>
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patio11
100%: Selling things to people for money.

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axod
Are the people upvoting this also selling directly to end users? Or just
upvoting to agree that it is a good revenue model :/

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stingraycharles
Both: I am licensing to companies myself, and yeah, it's also a damn good
revenue model.

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justinchen
A few different sites w/ diff models:

    
    
      Consumer facing listings site
      90% advertising (prem ad partners + adsense)
      10% affiliate
    
      Consumer facing subscription
      98% subscriptions
      1% advertising
      1% affiliate
    
      Consumer facing pay per use
      100% customer payments

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a-priori
Just curious: on the second one, serving ads doesn't bring in much income, and
it might even drive people away. Have you considered removing them? If so,
what was the result?

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justinchen
The percentage is so low because it's not shown on much of the site. Paying
subscribers don't ever see ads. It only shows for the free account and for
some long tail SEO pages we have. We probably should remove them and just put
up-sell copy there though...

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jacquesm
90% subscriptions (monthly renewals, $19.95)

10% advertising (adsense)

The sample you provide leaves a rather large hole to be explained.

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vaksel
oh those aren't real numbers, I just gave examples of some options, since I
want it a little bit more detailed than "advertising"

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jacquesm
Ok, so, since you're asking us, what are your numbers ?

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vaksel
august:

adsense - 37%

tribal fusion - 26%

direct ad sales - 17%

CJ affiliate ads - 16%

donations - 4%

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jacquesm
Thank you!

Interesting the 'donations' column. And tribal fusion looks like a pretty
serious contender for adsense wrt to income.

That's a nice datapoint to have.

If you want to trade 'absolutes' drop me a line.

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vaksel
Tribal fusion is good if you have a lot of page views but few clicks(they just
do CPM ads, but are pretty much top dog in the space, so they can get better
rates), but you need a lot of traffic to get in.

You need about 5K uniques per day to get in, although that number varies by
category...for example I hear that if you have a game website, you'll need 20K
uniques per day to get in.

I just needed CPM since I get a lot of page views per user, average is only ~6
pages, but that number is distorted by all the one page wonders from when the
site hits some social network. The actual users who come to the site from
niche specific sources, do about 20 pages per hit.

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jacquesm
Lots of pageviews/uniques is not my problem, getting enough people to click
the ads is. Adsense scores horrible on one site we run because of that.

I will definitely sign up and let you know how it worked out.

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boggles
100% Adsense: $1.50 Adsense revenue from 10,000 unique visitors so far.

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swolchok
AdSense is such a rude awakening.

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dejb
1\. Sponsorships

2\. Direct advertising

3\. Adsense

1 + 2 are sometimes blurred

2 + 3 are sometimes reversed

...as the other guy said your own numbers don't add up. And furthermore they
are out of order.

...and we try not to just break even

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kiba
Income breakdown:

100% projectwonderful. Advertising space.

However, my site is not a web application or anything. It is just an
encyclopedia on purely all things open source gaming, and the only one in the
universe. As a result, I doubt there are many ways to monentize the traffic.

It gave me nice money to booststrap my game development site, although I still
need to make it "real serious as in not-just-for-fun" startup firm.

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GavinB
What's the url of your site?

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kiba
Since you asked, <http://libregamewiki.org>

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hikari17
We're the platform provider in a two-sided genealogy market (genealogy
document clients on one side, genealogy lookup providers on the other.) We
take a commission from providers (15% of their selling price) and a processing
charge from clients (10% of the provider's selling price.)

So our income breaks down as:

client processing charge: 40%

provider commission: 60%

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callmeed
Ours breaks down something like this:

One-time fees: 30% Subscriptions: 60% Transaction fees: 8% Service/consulting:
2%

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aw3c2
100% no income, I run my site because I love to (no linky).

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Pistos2
100% from donations, 0% from AdSense. Donations facilitated by
<http://pledgie.com/> .

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spencerfry
100% premium subscriptions (monthly)

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dpcan
100% Monthly subscriptions.

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rs
premium subscriptions - 99.9999% Adsense - 0.0001%

(Sorry, just had to say it out - Adsense just hasn't worked for me)

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petervandijck
Adsense: 99% Donations: 1%

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axod
adsense: 90%+

