
Ask HN: What to do with 3K visitors a month? - SpendBig
I created a chat site with an open chat. Very basic. Additionally I added a profile system. Also very basic. Now I have about 3K visitors a month, make about $30 dollar a month through adsense, but I dont have any clue on how to make it more profitable.
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philsnow
What to do with them ? Do right by them. Try to figure out why they are using
your site instead of some other one (slack comes to mind), figure out who your
audience is, talk to them to try to find out who they are (not necessarily
"what they want", because people will tell you all kinds of things), and give
them what they need.

If, at the end of all this, you don't have a clearer idea about how to help
these people to happily give you their time / money / eyeballs, then maybe
just leave it be and enjoy $30 worth of beer each month or something.

~~~
SpendBig
Thanks!

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vblord
$30/month is pretty good for 3k in visitors i think. I get about 10k visitors
and only make $25 off adsense. What's your website address? I'd love to see
where your ad placement is at. Maybe it has to do with the amount of time the
users are on the site.

In terms of getting more $, affiliate income makes lots of money. In the old
days when we used to run sites with adsense and affiliates, the affiliate
income accounted for about 70% of the revenue. If you had a good place on your
site for it, I'd start by looking in to the amazon associates program. FYI.
The amazon affiliate pays out from 4% - 10% of the sale of the product.

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SpendBig
To bad, I have no idea what ads to target. Could be just anything. But I guess
adult content would do pretty well. Most of the people really talk some nasty
stuff.

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ncouture
Do they know you're in on their conversations?

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SpendBig
Yes ofcourse. It is am open chat, no private conversations are possible for
the chat. But when user register, they can send private messages to each
other. These i can not read.

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jayzalowitz
Dont.

We haven't monetized hackernoon.com at all and have instead focused on good
content and we are now well into the millions of monthly uniques. Its not
worth the time to monitize 3k visitors

~~~
iamben
I'm half with you. I think monetising 3k people on a generic chat site is
going to be hard/impossible (what interests one may not interest the other).
That said, monetising 3k people in a micro niche could potentially be
absolutely worth it. For instance, if the 3k are chatting about poker - you
may only need to convert a handful a month with the right offer to make it a
nice bit of extra (semi) passive income.

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SpendBig
Very nice, thanks for the feedback. To give it a bit more context.

The reason I'm not sharing the url is because the code is somewhat outdated
and may be insecure. In my spare time I'm working on a new version which
matches some of the recent security 'standards'. The website started as a
project just for learning how to develop a basic website with interaction
between users. So about seven years ago I tried becoming new instance of
\Zuckerberg. I started chatting the website all over de chat-places. I added a
twitter account, following (by hand :)) all those singles and lonely people
out there hoping they follow back. Greeting them every day and helping other
twitter addicts keeping their following list clean with new tools also
presented within a backoffice on the same website.

My situation only allows me to work just a couple of hours a week on a side
project. The reason I'm looking for some new ideas to monetize the project a
bit more is because I want to buy a new house, like within a year or so. Just
need a 100K in euros additionally to buy a nice place to give my son the full
experience of life as much as possible in the way me and my wife dream about
it. I can't just switch jobs, because the company I work for did alot for me.
And I am a v ery loyal person when it comes to people/businesses helping me
out with stuff.

Now, for the chat service, its more like a lonely-chat-service. About 100
visitors a day, saying "Hi, is there anyone around here?" or something like
that. Then, the silence is killing them at which point they probably start
clicking thos e ads :) So as I removed the usefull stuff from the website,
people started clicking more on ads, to just get away.

When I read the feedback, I think I should just add some sort of feedback
button or create a popup with a textarea in which they can add their dream
they expected to get in by entering the website. And then start building them
those dream s, for just a penny a day.

~~~
ttam
As vblord and others have said: you need to work on the product if ultimately
you want it to grow.

But here's another way you can make some money with 3k users: sell something
to them. As some have said, things like custom emojis, digital roses, etc,
might work. But think outside of the tech box and offer to sell actual
physical things e.g. a user could buy flowers for another user and you take
care of the service and take a cut out of it.

There's actually a show right now on tv called "Halt and Catch Fire"
([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/)
best show ever about tech imho) and they're trying to grow a startup who's
service is a chat service!

~~~
vblord
ttam, i hear Silicon Valley is supposed to be a really great show about that
too.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/)

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aminozuur
Why would you want to make it more profitable? The alternative is giving your
users a better, ad-free experience. What makes you happier: 1) Getting
$100/month in revenue 2) Having a fast growing group of users who love your
web-app?

~~~
stanmancan
I don't think that's really a fair comment. There's lots of reasons to want to
monetize a project, including to pay for servers, fund future development, and
fund future projects. All it takes is a few small sites/services that are
making >= $500/m via ads or paid customers to be able to quit your job and
focus your time on said projects.

~~~
betenoire
The parent worded it poorly IMO. But the notion is real.

The parent made it seem like you had to choose between making money or a good
app, which is obviously nonsense.

But I do identify with getting more gratification from solving a problem well
and offering to others for free than potentially making money off of it. I
might be weird, but money is a drug, and I'll take just what I need (or what
my wife says we need).

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Trufa
You need to provide more information about the services you provide.

How specialized are you, maybe if you're incredibly specialized and have the
right crowd, you can start having premium accounts, in exchange for special
features.

3k is pretty low, for a chat service (in general, maybe for extremely
specialized services it isn't).

If possible, try to expand your userbase, advertising? Social sharing?
Affiliate programs?

The possibilities are endless and you live and die by the specifics of your
niche.

Decide if you want to aim for massive, or niche, ads, premium features,
freemium?

If you want more specifics, I think you need to be more specific in your
question, but then I'll gladly expand.

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xiaoma
> _"...but I dont have any clue on how to make it more profitable."_

You probably won't fix that in this thread if you don't share the URL or even
enough information about your chat site for people to give educated feedback.

What kind of users are they? Do they chat about everything or is there a theme
or geographical niche? What kinds of ads are displaying through adsense? How
long did it take you to get to 3k users? Do you feel like it will be hard to
get more? Why did you throw up adsense at such low traffic?

~~~
SpendBig
What kind of users are they? > mostly people that search chat sites like "free
chat sites without registration" and those that click links on chat link
pages.

Do they chat about everything or is there a theme or geographical niche? >
Dutch visitors, 99%. No theme, just a single chatbox, and another one for
registered users. Mostly chatting about adult related stuff or searching for
men/woman.

What kinds of ads are displaying through adsense? > anything, I took the
advice that popped up in google adsense.

How long did it take you to get to 3k users? > took me a few years, but i
spent just a few hours a week like half a year to get those monthly 3K.

Do you feel like it will be hard to get more? >Just figuring that out now.

Why did you throw up adsense at such low traffic? > Someone told me I could
get $ for throwing adsense on my site and i was wondering how much that would
be

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stanmancan
Aside from having ads on the site, your only real option is a paid plan. In
that case, just start marketing the project as "beta" and add a pricing page
that says the pricing is "coming soon". Continue building out features and
once you get a good enough product to charge for add a paid plan and flip
everybody else over to the default "Free Plan" that's limited in a way that
users can still use the site, but have enough reasons to upgrade to the paid
plan.

Whatever you do I'd try to listen to your users and see exactly what they
want. 3,000 users really isn't very many and it would be really easy for them
to disappear. Talk to your users, find out why they're using your
site/service, keep that in mind when building out your feature set.

Edit: Keep in mind, building out the service and keeping it free is also an
option, especially if you enjoy working on and running the site. If you listen
to your users and keep improving the product, it's very possible to turn 3K
monthly users into 300K. I run an API that has a front end site which gets
around 175K monthly hits and brings in about $1300+ (CAD) a month from the
ads. The site costs peanuts to run so I'm happy to serve the 35 million API
calls for free and fund the project 100% via adsense. It just depends on how
far you'd like to scale it and what your users are like.

~~~
SpendBig
Thanks! When I finished the rebuild, I will be able to create and maintain
some new features based on what users want. Will keep de the paid plans in
mind! Maybe just a very small amount, it does not cost me that much to run the
service.

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throwawayValue
It's a great feeling knowing that you've built something which is used by
thousands of people, but even better when it's generating revenue to cover the
costs (your time, hosting, etc). However, to put things in perspective you're
really only talking about 100 visitors per day and $1 in revenue. Factoring
that, I suggest focusing more on improving the site, growing it's traffic and
then when it passes 500 visitors per day start focusing on revenue. If you
prefer the AdSense route, make sure you've optimized your ad placements and
the type of ads you're serving.

This advice is coming from someone who has a site doing roughly $5k month from
AdSense via 275k+ visitors / 1.3M+ pageviews and it makes up about 30% of the
site's revenue. Rest is from paid plans & affiliate marketing.

~~~
iurisilvio
Follow this advice! 3k users is awesome. It validates your product. Get more
users to do more money.

It is a nice challenge and you'll learn a lot.

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milesvp
As a chat service, you may have some options for adding premium emoji, premium
avatars, or other digital displays of wealth. Digital gifts can be another
option. Ok Cupid is rumored to have made a lot on digital roses. Premium
services like private rooms may have value as well.

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jeffmould
My question is do you have 3000 visitors or 3000 MAU? There is a big
difference. With Adsense there are things to consider to increase your
revenue, such as who your users are (location and demographic), the type of
content on the site, and how long they stay on your site.

As others have pointed out, without knowing more about your site it's
difficult to answer. But some suggestions. Try selling add-ons such as premium
emojis or avatars. Look towards a premium account with added features as well.

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jlobato63
I suggest to add some premium content to profiles. Charge a very low price -
2-3 Euros/month - and have people pay at the end of each month. If they dont
pay then close their account/profile. This way they only pay if they are
satisfied and allways have the last 30 free days. You only need 10 paying
customers/visitors - 0,3% of current visitor numbers to earn the same as with
adsense

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namank
Go to a startup meetup and hook up with someone you think will be great at
marketing or knows something about the chat space that you don't.

Partner with them on making this more profitable.

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ialex
I work building tools for ad optimizers, next step they take is to get an
account for DFP and Ad exchange(Google) which offers better revenue, there are
also other ad networks you can configure on DFP to boost revenue like
PubGalaxy the thing is you need to take time to test each one or get help for
a pro ad optimizer and these days all big publishers are using Header bidding,
you can reach me alejandro [at] ialex.org if want more details.

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zerognowl
Flattr is worth investigating: [https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)

Also you can ask for Bitcoin / Litecoin donations depending on how technical
your visitors are. I know you want normal currency, but you can convert BTC
using Coinbase and other exchanges

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montibbalt
It's awesome that you made it this far, but to be honest 3k MAU just isn't
enough. If you're making money through ads, you'll want more eyeballs on them
so try getting more users! Depending on how far you want to take it, your
username may unfortunately become very relevant.

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kwhitefoot
Where is it? If you had given us the URL you might have got a few cents more.

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shanecleveland
Is it oriented toward businesses? Or is there an angle to create a more
business-oriented version? Better ad payouts in my experience, and more likely
to pay for a service.

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afarrell
Does your community share some set of problems in common? If so, look for
sponsorship by an organization that makes money solving those problems.

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wehadfun
You could probably sell ads on your own depending the audience. If its a bunch
of CEOs on their you could probably sell ads for millions.

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dismantlethesun
Depends on what they're talking about. What's the name of your site?

