
How not to monetise a popular blog - 3stripe
http://greig.cc/literally-a-shipment-of-fail-dot-com/
======
mcguire
" _I didn’t build up a mailing list. At one point I had almost 20,000 people
subscribing via Feedburner. Imagine if I had converted half of them to email
subscribers. That would have been a huge platform to work from. And email is
the single most effective way of communicating with people online._ "

I don't get it. I'm on like 27 mailing lists from places where I bought
something or had to set up an account for some reason, and the first thing I
do is set up a filter that shovels their traffic into thr trash.

Why does everyone say, set up a mailing list?

~~~
pryelluw
Because most people want to read what you publish. No further explanation
needed.

Now, being included on a mailing list because you bought something is a dick
move. However, most people dont mind.

~~~
Swizec
I do the list on buy thing and the first email people get is "If you don't
want this, unsubscribe now [big fat link]"

Almost nobody takes me up on it. My guess is they care about the free updates
and such.

The reason I do this is because I too once made the mistake of not building a
mailing list for a moderately popular blog.

~~~
detaro
I wonder how many people just delete that mail without even consciously
reading far enough. I've observed some interesting cases of "banner blindness"
in myself with helpful information that was _too_ big and fat...

~~~
Swizec
Good point.

But hey, every email I send has an unsub link and the unsub rate is around
half a percent. I can live with that and apparently so can my audience.

~~~
Jaruzel
However though, are the other 99.5% actually seeing your mails, or have most
of them just blacklisted your domain and your mails now go to junk
automatically?

I think the blacklisting/mark-as-spam is MUCH more prevalent than people
unsubscribing due to the harvesting of active email addresses (as mentioned
above).

~~~
Swizec
This of course is hard to know. My open rates are in the 30% to 35% range for
normal weekly stuff and shoot up to 60% for special events.

I don't think too many people have blacklisted me yet.

~~~
Optimal_Persona
FWIW - I'm on your list and find your content's signal to noise ratio pretty
high. I like how you continually push yourself to learn new things, and bring
the reader along on your journey.

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coldcode
My programming blog has been around more than a decade and gets around 200K
visitors a year. Early on I played around with various ad networks but
discovered (not surprisingly) that programmers hate ads and won't click on
anything. I decided that writing and getting people to talk about stuff
(elsewhere, I removed commenting too) was enough pay for me to continue. I
support RSS and twitter as subscription methods and leave it at that. I am
sure there are ways to monetize but I just don't care to.

~~~
squeakynick
I’m happy to share my data too. I’ve been blogging for half a dozen years at
[http://datagenetics.com/blog.html](http://datagenetics.com/blog.html) and
have slowly built my traffic up to about 300k PV a month.

A couple of years ago, I installed a single Google Adense skyscraper advert on
each page. As others have mentioned, it doesn’t pay much more than a couple of
beers a week. On a good month I’ll generate about $100/month from these
adverts (which is, at least, enough to cover hosting costs).

I’ve had an RSS feed forever, I’m not sure it does a lot. I’ve recently put up
a link allowing people to sign up for a newsletter. This mailing list has
grown to about 750 recipients. Open rates on mailings are 30%-40% and click-
through rate has a higher variance and ranges from 8%-20% (If you are going to
experiment with email, I highly recommend a product called Sendy, it works
great). Of course, I have a Facebook page to promote each article, and I also
tweet a link to each article (where I have just a couple of thousand
followers). The biggest generator of traffic is being featured on places like
here on Hacker News, Reddit, or being featured on one of the large
portals/news sites; these bring supernovae spikes in traffic for the time the
links are in the sun. I also get a non-trivial amount of traffic from
localized versions of my pages; People seem to like to translate my articles
into foreign languages and usually put link-back credits, which is how I find
out (I guess there could be people who do it without giving credit, and for
those, I’m just ignorant about!)

I’ve embedded the occasional link to Amazon to allow users to purchase, if I
mentioned a book I like. Amazon’s affiliate program gives me a small
percentage cut of anything a user buys within a short time after following the
link of my page. It works, and I get some revenue, but in total, it’s not yet
broken $100 total lifetime earnings. As regards content, I try to publish a
new article every week.

Bottom line - until I can get, at least, two orders of magnitude increase in
traffic (or CPM), it will remain a hobby 

------
kasparsklavins
_" Does anyone other than a graphic designer ever look at a website and think
“Holy crap. That thing is a pixel out of place!”. Probably not."_

Users won't notice when something is perfect. But when anything is misaligned,
it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Dont give up, we care about the pixel.

~~~
coldtea
> _Users won 't notice when something is perfect. But when anything is
> misaligned, it sticks out like a sore thumb._

No, it really does not. Users don't care for Drudge Report not being perfect,
Craigslist not being perfect, and thousand other huge volume sites.

~~~
Nullabillity
Uncanny valley, not trying at all looks a lot better than trying hard and
being slightly off.

And besides, Craigslist and Drudge Report don't look _nice_ , but they still
look aligned in the places where they're trying.

~~~
coldtea
> _Uncanny valley, not trying at all looks a lot better than trying hard and
> being slightly off._

Nice counter-argument, but I'd still say no. There are still tons of sites
that try but are still off, and people don't care at all, they're still huge.

It's all about the service, unless one's is catering to OCD customers.

------
bemmu
I love reading experiments like these with actual numbers included.

To me $225 / month (6£ / day) doesn't seem bad at all. Some A/B testing of ad
placement could get that to $500 / month. Then you find a freelancer for $100
/ month to update it. You could live with 10 such sites in your portfolio,
except at least in my case I can never resist spending my time tweaking them
instead of starting new ones. "Maybe just one change and it'll be 30% bigger!"

~~~
pryelluw
You need to hire a social manager (email is social media). Have them manage
while you grow new ones.

OT: Why dont you vlog about candy from japan? Id love to see videos about
it.Maybe stores that sell it, taste comparisons, history of a specific candy,
etc.

~~~
bemmu
I guess I became a bit disillusioned after I couldn't attribute a single sale
to this popular video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCgXVkYQcA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCgXVkYQcA)
(here's my writeup on it with stats: [https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-
scenes/sales-results-f...](https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/sales-
results-from-getting-3-million-views-on-youtube))

"Figuring out YouTube" is definitely still something I'm interested in,
though. Writing might be more suitable for me, but I don't often come across
topics about Japanese candy where I could easily imagine how to get any
distribution for them (where to post).

~~~
pryelluw
Contact a known female cosplayer on Instagram and see if they will promote
your stuff for a % of the profits.

------
tobltobs
Selling a side for 3 _month_ earnings? Too cut losses and cash in? And I
always thought 3 years earning would be a steal.

The one who later bought shipmentoffail.com for 5000$ seems to have failed
even more. shipmentoffail.com is a parked domain now.

~~~
sanswork
3 months isn't that bad for something that is currently a meme since tastes
move so rapidly it's likely the traffic will be home in a year. Ford most
sites 1 year is around a good price but you're almost never going to get 3
traffic is just too unpredictable in most cases.

------
Finnucane
An unmonetized blog on the Internet? Oh, the humanity.

------
sanswork
My wife use to run a travel blog that got kind of popular at points. We were
never able to make any income from online advertising(though if we put the
effort into direct sales it probably could have done better) but we got more
than enough free stuff over the years to make it worth operating.

Hotels, restaurants, attractions, tours, transport, etc are all often willing
to give you free access, free upgrades or a huge discount with the promise of
a post. You have to be honest in your approach with the fact that you don't
guarantee a positive post just a post though(and you have to follow through
with negative posts when they are deserved).

------
mattbgates
If anything, the most important lesson in blogging: blog for passion. Don't
blog for money. If you can figure out ways to monetize for money, than do so.
But never expect it.

Been running
[http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com)
for a few years now. In the beginning, it wasn't making any money at all. I
eventually decided to sell ad space for $2 a month (now $5 a month due to
increased popularity), and I have quite a few companies that purchase ad
space. Occasionally, I'll get a sponsored post (they pay me to prioritize
their article or pay me to write it), but most of the income comes from the
ads.

It is not much, but it does pay for the server it sits on and did buy me a
laptop when mine broke. Wish I could quit my day job and do it full-time, but
I'm passionate about it to keep it going. My visitors and contributors are the
ones who really keep me going when I get bored or lose interest in maintaining
it. If it weren't for them, I'm sure it would've been in the archives of the
Internet.

My interest in the topic of the website is much more important than the amount
of money I could make from the website. So anyone who comes along and offers a
monetary donation is certainly helping out.

------
ams6110
_The worst designed website I’d ever created was the most popular.

Everything I thought I knew about the importance of design had been blown out
of the water._

Just look at Drudge Report for another example of this.

~~~
sverige
Actually, Drudge Report is a great example of website design that works. OK,
maybe you hate Drudge for political reasons, but his site gets more visitors
than yours. You might be able to learn something from that.

I have visited it pretty regularly since 1998 and it is awesome that it looks
the same now as it did then. There's no stuff that floats up or down or around
or in from one of the edges, no blinking fucking arrow telling me to scroll
down for more info (as if I hadn't figured that out since the only thing
visible is three words in a 400 pt. font and that's not exactly what I was
looking for), no autoplay videos, no hamburger buns, no tabs, none of what
passes for "good web design." I can see at a glance what I might be interested
in, and when I click on it, I get more info. A back arrow gets me back to the
place I started.

Tell me again how that's bad design.

~~~
ams6110
I agree actually -- I mentioned Drudge Report as another example of the
phenomenon that a website can be popular without a lot of visual design. Maybe
the point is that content trumps appearance.

Also good point about the design not changing. I hate that seemingly every
time I go to pay my Comcast bill the UX is different.

~~~
barrkel
It sounds like you're conflating appearance with visual design. I think
they're barely related.

Appearance has to do with aesthetics, design has to do with use. They
certainly intersect in that they both affect the end result, but their
purposes are almost completely orthogonal.

------
Houshalter
Could a blog like this succeed today? Seems like this function has been taken
over by Reddit Tumblr and Facebook. None of which pay the content creators and
steal most their content from other sites.

~~~
shouldbworking
I would say probably, if you're a good enough writer and game the search
results a bit.

One of my employers gave me permission to spend a day a week writing articles
for a couple months. I wrote 5 articles and they brought in over 90% of our
site traffic for years, even thought we had hundreds of articles on the site
and new ones added a few times a week.

The quality of writing matters an extreme amount, more than any of the content
farms have you believe. If your content is unique, useful, or brilliant, even
to a small number of people, it will bring you good traffic for a long time.
We didn't have Facebook sharing or any advertising. People simply shared the
links organically

------
mdotk
People going to a meme site don't want to buy anything, he didn't lose a thing
by not setting up an email list.

~~~
ozim
Yeah, second that. Lesson from this post is that 500$ was good deal for such
site and "amount of work" he put in is not actual value of site. It is
something to learn that things are only worth as much as someone is willing to
pay for not amount you think it is.

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JohnJamesRambo
It seems his "current blog" failed too lol. Cyclelove.net points to nothing.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I clicked through to the front page of his main blog, and my eyeballs melted.

Some designers have strange ideas about colour choices. I suspect the number
of people who want to read a small block of black text on a monitor-filling
solid slightly-off-bright-lime-green background is not huge.

I don't think I'm being unreasonably picky here. I actually said "Aaargh!" out
loud when the page loaded. (Or words to that effect, anyway.)

------
fzilla
why

stop

at

a

new

paragraph

for

each

sentence?

why

not

a

new

paragraph

for

each

word?

