
How to Monetize Maker Blogs to at least $99/m - ronaldl93
A few days ago I built a little site called https:&#x2F;&#x2F;makerblogs.xyz.<p>After a few people submitted their blogs via Twitter, I decided to post it on Product Hunt.<p>To my surprise, it actually went semi-viral and reached #2 for the day on PH. Quite a big deal for me.<p>Probably a premature &#x27;launch&#x27; if I may call it that, as I realised I forgot something major - I never set Cloudinary (my image CDN) to resize images into something smaller before serving as static files.
This has caused my bandwidth allowance from Cloudinary to max out, currently standing at 208%. Ouch. Somehow they still haven&#x27;t cut me off and they are still serving the static images.<p>I tweeted Cloudinary if there&#x27;s a way to bulk resize images, but no response yet.<p>They will probably pull the plug on me eventually unless I pay $99&#x2F;m for their service, which wouldn&#x27;t make any business sense, considering I&#x27;m not making any money off this site.<p>Anyone else got ideas on how I can potentially monetise to at least pay for my hosting and servers?<p>(I added a &quot;sponsor&quot; button to see if I can get a reaction)
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mosedart
Yeah, there's a pretty easy way to do that, the entire idea of Cloudinary is
you just pass the size you want in the image URL.

Cloudinary isn't just image hosting, it's a transformation service. Take this
image which you are serving at almost 4mb (!):
[https://res.cloudinary.com/cinemakers/image/upload/v15440892...](https://res.cloudinary.com/cinemakers/image/upload/v1544089238/profilepics/fc38c35c-f93a-11e8-b32f-5600019ed549.jpg)

To display at 240x340:
[https://res.cloudinary.com/cinemakers/image/upload/w_240,h_3...](https://res.cloudinary.com/cinemakers/image/upload/w_240,h_340,c_fill,g_auto/profilepics/fc38c35c-f93a-11e8-b32f-5600019ed549.jpg)

notice the transformations in the URL. c_fill is the "fill" crop mode, and
"g_auto" stands for "auto gravity", meaning Cloudinary will find the salient
features in the image and crop accordingly.

This reduces the file size under 20kb, and you should be well within your free
plan limits after making these changes.

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kristianp
I would guess your usage will go down once the PH article gets off the front
page, so the problem should only be temporary.

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billconan
you can corporate with sparkfun and adafruit with ad for parts.

