

Ask HN: How to monetize we website with 80.000 page views per month - sareiodata

The website in question is &#60;a href="http://gamers-lab.com" &#62;gamers-lab.com&#60;/a&#62; It's a portal for system requirements and release dates for games. Currently, a friend works on it as a hobby and gets $40 - $50 per month from Google Adsense.<p>Traffic related, it's been growing organically (and linear), comes from search mostly and currently it's around 80.000 page views per month.<p>There's a little bit of extra functionality besides the standard listing of system requirements and release dates:
- possibility to create an account on the site (http://www.gamers-lab.com/register/)
- once you create an account you can enter your gaming system (processor, video card, etc) and based on it you get a "You can run this game" feedback when you visit a game.<p>So where to go from here? Some ideas we had:
- affiliate sales for games (we actually tried this but it didn't work)
- subscribe to notifications for new games when they get released (to increase user retention and traffic)
- payed members? Perhaps $5 per year. Not sure what to offer for this to be worth for the users.<p>Any feedback is more then welcomed. Thank you.
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acoyfellow
Congrats on getting to this point- I hope someday I'll get to this level.

But to answer your question (coming from a college student): My first thought
was to be able to pre-order these games, but you said that didn't work.

What about instead of selling the games, since your main idea is focused
around the system requirements- you could do affiliate linking to the products
users need.

Then they see exactly what they need, and appreciate + gladly go through your
link to get their system to the playable level?

I'll be able to go to gamers-lab.com, find the game I am interested in, "Run
this game", and if my computer dosen't meet the specs required I'll find the
links easily I need to upgrade my rig. Sounds like a pretty slick service to
me.

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sareiodata
Thanks! This is a really good idea and shouldn't be to hard to implement.
We'll look into it to see what it takes.

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acoyfellow
No problem!

Care to share any light how you achieved that amount of traffic?

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cheae
You can atleast double the adsense earnings by changing your adplacement.

Some suggestions : 1\. Move 300X250 on the sidebar above your Facebook box.
2\. Move 300X250 in the content area up, close to your content.

