

Ask HN: I made $1.01 yesterday. What next? - AlexC04

On Monday night I couldn't sleep.  I had a domain name that I'd bought (http://fstr.net) that wasn't getting approved by the parking provider.<p>It was just sitting there, doing nothing and I couldn't stand it.  So I thought why not put some web games on it?<p>So I coded... and coded ... and coded ... and by 3AM I had a page, with a database that linked up a bunch of games that were declared "embeddable" by their owner (addictinggames.com).<p>Tuesday, it made $0.50 on Adsense.  Yesterday $1.01.<p>Now if only I were able to scale that up by about 80 times (using only part time labor) and I'd be able to 'take the pay cut' so I could switch into scaling it up by about 200 times for a great big raise!<p>Reading HN has really opened my eyes to the fact that the internet is made by people.  It doesn't have to be created by corporations - but it's something that anyone can do.  Holy Crap! Even me.<p>I just checked my profile and I've been a Hacker News reader for 94 days.  With the income I've earned from this project, that's an income of over a penny a day so far...  Let's see if I can ramp that up?<p>I want to put some time into improving the technology.  Initially I was loading a random list of about 1000 games - but I've changed that to show the games sorted by order or user rank.<p>I've also got game tag and category data - so I can add navigation, maybe a fun, self updating 'active search' type of thing (I'm already loading the games via ajax)<p>I'd like to pull from other games sources - many of the big games sites allow you to host their games (since they get the linkback on the flash load screen)<p>Some even have revenue sharing on the ads inside the game as well.<p>The page desperately needs to be optimized in terms of adsense placement.  I'm getting a 1.5% CTR and I've got friends who have shown me placements that they earn 30% off of.  He tells me he's got optimizations that earn him 70% CTR.<p>I'd also like to redesign (again) so it looks a little more polished and professional.  So far it's really just a ~8 hour hack job and ugly.<p>But earning a dollar on the first day?  That's a bit encouraging.  I'd love to make a real, sustainable 'gig' out of running a games site (or any site for that matter) ...<p>I really think HackerNews might be the type of place that has the advice I need (and might be able to warn me off of some of the pitfalls I might run into).<p>Anything you can tell me would be greatly appreciated (a hell of a lot cheaper than an MBA program ;).
======
points
Don't believe the notion that making 100 websites that earn $1 a day is easier
than making 1 website that makes $100 a day. It's not.

Create value, make users want to stick around, iterate, grow.

~~~
ComputerGuru
_However_ , making 50 sites that make 500 a day is a lot easier than making
one site that makes 25000 a day. _A lot_ easier.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Making 1 site that makes 500 a day is quite difficult. Just ask about 99% of
people here on HN that have tried.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Guess I didn't get the memo. I'm not quite at 500 yet, but it took 12 hours to
make a site that makes 250 a day. I'm sure I can easily bring that up to 500
(for instance, the site doesn't even render in IE right now). And I can make
another 10 like it.

In response to FreeRadical: It's all about the point of diminishing returns. I
spent 6 years on my first site, and it's a huge amount of work with literally
thousands of manhours put into it. Just a month ago I launched another site,
intended to be a minimum viable product that I can just develop and leave, and
it's working out OK thus far. Don't get me wrong, the first is very much
successful (2MM+ pageviews a month), but that's thousands of hours I could
have put into making multiple other sites, each making a lot less but
relatively more.

~~~
codexon
_but it took 12 hours to make a site that makes 250 a day_

I'd really like to see the stats on that.

Every time someone tells me that they spent (small amount of hours) on a
website that (makes more than $1 a day) they are exaggerating to the extreme
by not including advertising, hosting, domain expenses and maintenance time.

~~~
nl
I was like you for a long time, until two things happened:

1) I met someone who is running a site that took him a few hours to build,
cents to run (AppEngine) (plus $20 for two domain names) and makes over
$1000/month (yeah, so he's spent more time since then, but not much.)

2) I build a site that cost me $15 to build ($10 domain hosting, $5 -
refundable - to join an affiliate program), hours to build (it's basically a
blog on Wordpress) and makes me nearly $200/month.

I can't say I'm an expert, but one way to duplicate this is to find a vertical
problem domain with a lot of interest (ie, busy forums), find some problem
they have (often it's some kind of calculation that people always have trouble
with) and build a crappy, ugly tool to do it for them. Make the calculation
URL addressable, then put a short note in a forum saying what you've done and
follow up by using it in a few discussions.

~~~
palish
But what part actually earns you money?

~~~
3pt14159
I've had best responses with Amazon's affiliate program. Made about $130 bucks
from something like 5 or 6 blog posts. Hourly rate worth it? Nope. Was it fun?
Yep. Basically what I've learned is that Google's dynamic ad placement is the
last thing you should try. Putting in an ad (or affiliate link, there are even
services that will auto do this with Javascript, so you're users wont see and
you don't have to be part of a billion referral programs. Gray hat? Maybe.)
that actually targets what you are talking about is so much more effective.

~~~
nl
I've written a context sensitive affiliate adserver that serves relevant ads
via Javascript. That works reasonably well, but I do need to optimize the ads
themselves some.

~~~
3pt14159
That is really cool. Have you open sourced it? It's JavaScript in the first
place so I know anyone can see it in your site, but it would be cool to track
it on Github.

~~~
nl
No, it's not open source.

Not much in in Javascript - just the part that displays the ad. All the
intelligence is on the server, mostly in Java.

------
olegkikin
30% to 70% CTR is nearly impossible. You can only get it in very specific
cases.

1.5% CTR is pretty good for Adsense. If you can get it up to 5%, consider
yourself lucky.

~~~
slouch
Recently, I had to find a new copy of lame_enc.dll for a computer I just
bought. Every site I landed on (besides sourceforge) had three or four
"Download" buttons. I wasn't confident that ANY of them weren't ads. I'm sure
those pages have a great ad CTR.

~~~
corprew
I recently did a survey of those sites, and a large number of those links are
links to other similar paid products that have more or less relevance to what
they're linking to or are of the '$5/month virus check' variety.

------
TamDenholm
This isnt answering your question but i've got a quick suggestion for you dev
wise.

Cache those images on your front page, then stitch them together into a big
sprite and then use CSS to display the specific image from the sprite. It'll
greatly decrease the load time on that page.

Ref: <http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/>

~~~
eru
Wouldn't you want to decrease load times? Or do you think people are more
likely to click on an ad, if they have to wait longer?

~~~
carbocation
Doing that would decrease load times for repeat visitors.

------
chipsy
Product differentiation would be an obvious next step:

\- Start growing a player community(which is how Kongregate works)

\- Place more extreme filters on quality or genre(this is the basis of sites
like physicsgames.net).

\- Invest in some exclusive content. This is expensive and probably a bad idea
at the early stage, but the fastest way to get started is to go onto
FlashGameLicense and browse the stuff that's up for bid or auction.

I would suggest taking some time to figure out your focus before you go too
deeply into the site optimization, else you'll build the wrong thing.

~~~
AlexC04
Yeah - driving traffic via sponsored games would be in the long term plan. I'm
still not certain if the traffic is sustainable.

After all, after friends and family finish checking it out, who do I have
left? Everything gets a 'blip' at the start with your first facebook post "he
friends, check it out" then trickle until search engines find you.

I wrote a game for KONG once. I like how it works there.
(<http://www.kongregate.com/games/lythrdskynrd/dizzy-ship>)

There is a question of the value of sponsored game traffic VS a good PPC
campaign. What point do you decide it's worth throwing a few hundred down on a
sponsorship? I'm not sure :)

------
i-like-water
Congrats on the site and getting started on a project.

How are you driving visitors to the site currently?

~~~
AlexC04
<http://imgur.com/kw2av>

:D ummm. ycombinator

I read another comment about reddit / stumble / digg / etc... So I'll have to
go there next. For today, once I get tag-navigation done (it's looking pretty
sweet already) then I guess a reddit submission.

Since I regularly read reddit I'll feel a little more comfortable with the
community there. Hopefully they'll be as supportive as HN is :)

I really do feel nervous about making sure people like it, and making sure
it's good enough to show off.

Showing work in progress to HN is a bit of a different story because we're all
such "doers" around here. I guess I just feel "safer" starting here. (if that
makes sense?)

~~~
i-like-water
ycombinator may be a good temporary boost of traffic while you're on the
frontpage of HN but you'll need to look at a more sustainable way of
generating traffic - this is where I struggle the most. I run an ecommerce
company that does a moderate bit of traffic (around 70k uniques a month) - 70%
of my traffic is PPC (Google, Yahoo/Bing) and the rest is done through organic
optimization. My business has a very low repeat customer ratio due to our
market (sorry can't explain this bit i don't want to share my company
publicly). Here is what i've learned:

I fucking hate SEO. I've spent well over 100k hiring and firing contractors
from around the world. I've worked with some of the biggest names in SEO down
to the most unknown people in India. We spend a lot of time trying to
manipulate search engines to work the way we want them and it's all a game. If
i were in your position i'd focus around creating content people WANT to use
and leverage communities like this to help figure out how to improve them so
WE market the product for you (this isn't easy though - you have to be
EXCEPTIONAL). General SEO/SEM tactics are good to know and practice, but i
really believe the best/most sustainable approach to a successful site is
creating something people actually want and are willing to tell their friends
about. Don't let this bit of discourage you, create something great!

------
dholowiski
OMG "it's made of people"!

Yeah it's a mindblow when you realize this. But it's not made of people who
spend 6 hours a night watching tv.

There has never been a better time for creators, of all kind.

~~~
justinchen
I wish that people would remember that "it's made by people" when they email
customer support. Sometimes people can be so harsh.

~~~
dholowiski
I worked in technical support for 12 years. Yeah it's amazing how people treat
other people over the phone or email.

~~~
Dylanlacey
Working in tech and retail showed me this. I decided to make it up to the
world in general, in a small way.

So now, every christmas, I find some of the services I use (like my bank, full
of VERY helpful, friendly people) who have call centres active on Christmas
day, and I ring them and say thanks and Merry Christmas.

The only downside is occasionally someone will cry because a random stranger
wished them a Merry Christmas because they're at work.

~~~
dholowiski
That's awesome. We had a customer who would call in about once a week just to
say hi and thank us. It's not supposed to work this way - but I guarantee she
got the best service of any of our customers. I once had a customer call me
back after a bad call, and apologize for being rude. It did nearly make me
cry.

------
ojbyrne
Hmmm, having brought this here, and showing that it can be monetized
relatively easily... expect competition ;-)

------
whimsy
Free tip:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/webgames>

I don't know how many of these are going to be embeddable, but I drop by there
every once in a while when I feel like procrastinating and sort by "top" for
this month or whatever.

This is great for you because people are essentially finding games for you and
crowd-sourcing a rating. The top games are usually pretty great. A handful
have actually blown me away.

------
trizk
Dont make 100 websites. Optimize this one. SEO and compelling content. There
are plenty sites that can help you with SEO if you Google for them. There was
even someone in the community offering services pro-bono. But do also make
your website more compelling/attractive. Integrate some value added service if
they give you your email. Like a high scores page or newsletter. See if you
can't make the games multiplayer and get some competition going.

------
maukdaddy
Obligatory clickable:

<http://fstr.net>

~~~
zecg
I'd lose the atrocious bevel on logo, looks positively amateurish. What's
wrong with plain old outlined font? Also, you need the bare minimum of added
value: let users rate games. Put the ratings in a database. There, you just
add some value.

Alternatively, a hand-picked selection of games is more value to me as a
visitor, than if you had every flash game in the universe embedded on that
page. No one has the time to play all those. Choosing which ones are worthy of
wasting your time is the hardest part.

~~~
AlexC04
Logo changed. I just dropped the bevel as advised. Better?

Ratings and comments "incoming" - on the list. There's a lot of feedback on
here so It's going to take me a few days to prioritize everything.

Facebook comments are quick though. I've done that before.

------
davidjeffries
Consider monetizing with game related affiliate programs. There are lots of
toolbars, gaming sites that pay $1-$3 CPAs which will improve your eCPM.

------
fletchowns
Seems like the last the web needs is another half assed Flash games site.

~~~
eru
You can't argue with profit.

~~~
AlexC04
I think I'm still at my "collect underpants" phase :)

(EDIT: for anyone who doesn't get the reference:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park)>)

------
benologist
You might like to check out my distribution feed - loads of great games zipped
up ready for distribution or embedding from a wide selection of the top devs
and portals:

<http://playtomic.com/games/catalog>

You can pull it all in via script through the very customizable feed:

<http://playtomic.com/games/feed>

Portals are a lot of work though. You'll need a strategy - find keywords you
want to target, optimize and build links towards them etc.

You can also license games through <http://www.flashgamelicense.com/> which
gets your branding in games and funnels traffic back to you.

~~~
Tichy
Your site crashed my browser and in turn my Mac. I never even saw it.

~~~
benologist
Really? Weird ... I have hundreds of users and nobody's reported any problems.
Was it the feed or the catalog link?

~~~
Tichy
catalog - I must admit I force killed the browser (Firefox) after a while, but
it resulted in an unkillable process. Therefore I had to hard reset the Mac.

~~~
benologist
Might have been the straw that broke the camel's back ... it loads a couple
hundred thumbnails since I haven't gotten around to paginating it / sorting
that stuff out yet.

------
benchmark
I've got a gaming website, like yours, but not as smart looking:
<http://www.funnygamesspot.com>

What I suggest is getting a Facebook fanpage up, and corral all your friends.
You could get a following for your site that will revisit it again and again.

Good luck, and nice work!

~~~
middlegeek
Nice! Are you making any money on your site?

~~~
benchmark
Averages out to less than a buck a day, so it's not a money maker by any
stretch of the imagination.

------
user24
1.5% is really not bad at all! How much traffic do you get per day?

I'd change the URL structure from numeric to keyword bases (happy to help with
apache config if you like).

I'd also provide a search box, powered by google search so you can still get
ad clicks. Add an addthis.com button to each page to build backlinks and
virality.

~~~
AlexC04
I'm on my third day of traffic so far. Waiting for analytics to arrive. I had
about 50 visitors yesterday and think I might be approaching 1000 for today :)

I've upgraded to adding TAGS & Categories for links - but am still stuck with
numbers on the games codes. I think you might be right though, in terms of SEO
that will improve value.

Unfortunately, at the moment, I'm populating the game page via ajax so google
won't really know what pages I've got on there until after I follow up with
those recommendations of yours.

I think it's good advice though.

~~~
user24
yeah, fstr.net/arcade-game is better than fstr.net/651

for memorability but also hugely important for SEO.

------
terra_t
Hey, you've hit the big time. Become an angel investor and give me the $1.01,
I'll turn it into $5.27 by next Tuesday.

------
bgraves
How many hits did you get for the past few days?

What were the traffic sources?

You might be able to do more targeted advertising to bring in more users,
although that would obviously cut into your meager earnings at this point.

Anyways, good on you for executing on an idea! Many people don't even get to
that point.

------
listic
With CTR of 1.5% and 245 visitors, it looks like you are making $0.5 per
click. Is it true? It seems to me it's ridiculously high price, or at leaast
not sustainable in the long term, isn't it?

I'm learning web programming, trying to start up little sites. Please leave me
your email or drop a line: nleschov at gmail

~~~
AlexC04
email sent. we'll have a chat and see if I can't help you out a bit :)

------
ryanteo
Hi Alex, nice work and congrats on your first step =) Have you ever thought of
specializing in showcasing just educational games/ flash games? I think it
would be very valuable and it would easily catch on among parents/young kids.
You could also link it to educational resources like Khan Academy, etc..

------
mobl
Contact me

I can help if lookin into gaming revenue.

jimmy@inodesoft.com

------
newobj
How do you drive traffic to this site?

I think there's a reasonable claim to be made that your ad placement is
deceptive. It looks like a navigational menu for the website.

Either way, good luck :)

------
middlegeek
Bravo and congrats! You have earned that first dollar. A dollar isn't always
very significant in everyday life but that figurative dollar is for you. Good
luck!

------
indiejade
Please. Fix. Logo. It's the only part of your site that really looks outdated.

~~~
AlexC04
Thanks. In terms of everything else, I admit it's poor. I cranked it out
quickly in fireworks and agree.

I like the colors - but the bevel is low quality. I'll have to make an effort
on the logo in round 2. :)

------
tropin
Does Google permit telling how much are you earning with Adsense?

~~~
AlexC04
yikes! thanks for this comment.

I'd actually just announced the earnings (as I wanted to share) - but my
ignorance of their policy in this respect has given way to caution.

I've deleted the post where I say the exact $ value of the earnings and
instead will just say that it's managed to buy a pizza dinner.

------
imp
Make $2.00 today.

------
andre
how are you getting the game data? going to each game and copying the info? or
did you automate it?

------
ddemchuk
Start promoting it to get traffic. Leverage stumbleupon, reddit,
facebook/twitter, and possibly organic.

Adsense pubs who make good money have sites that get a veritable shit ton of
traffic every day, or have sites with ads with incredibly high CPC amounts

