

Ask HN: Review my startup, FleshEatingZipper - One Year Later - kels

Hello everyone! 365 days ago I asked you to check out my startup, FleshEatingZipper: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2194580 (http://flesheatingzipper.com)<p>I just wanted to let everyone know what we've been up to, how much traffic we've been getting, etc.<p>The first few months we were so excited getting a few thousand people reading what we were posting and listening to our podcasts. At the end of May we decide to tackle Phoenix Comicon and at the beginning of June we had an article explode at a news aggregator and had almost 30,000 visitors that month.<p>The traffic dropped down to about 8,000 for the next two month until we were accepted in Google News in the middle of September. September we had 58,000 visitors, October it was 98,000 and November it was 328,000!<p>This traffic was just to much for our shared hosting account to handle so we bought a server. I work at a data center full time and one of the perks is free colocation/power/bandwidth. We decided to go with nginx and PHP-FPM because of the max connections limitations we read about with Apache.<p>We did over 1,000 articles and had over 2,500 comments in 2011.<p>In terms of revenue for 2011 we got paid from Google AdSense $125. We use other ad networks and have been doing campaigns but those have 60 day terms after the campaigns have completed so we didn't see anything else in 2011.<p>In January we launched our current design and should have a mobile theme soon. The site is WordPress, designed and built internally.<p>Currently we are averaging about 250,000 visitors a month and preparing for E3 in June.
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sagacity
Great going. Congrats and all the best moving forward.

> In terms of revenue for 2011 we got paid from Google AdSense $125.

For the whole year 2011? Do you run Google Ads on all the pages? What were
your total traffic numbers? Does that tell you anything?

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kels
Thanks. For the year we had a total of $2,243 in billable ad revenue but since
we didn't collect any of it except for Google AdSense, it's not being counted.
Every ad company that we use has 60 day terms.

As far as traffic 2011 total traffic was 670,587 unique and 1,013,611 page
views. For the longest time we had only 3 ads per page then upped that to 4.

That total revenue is not for just ad impressions but paid placement. On
average our CPM for ads is only $0.50.

We could be making more with pop-ups/unders and full page ads but we don't
want to be that type of site.

We know nothing about the online advertising game except it feels like we
should be making more. Right now we are working with a pretty large ad network
to hopefully bring us more ad revenue for 2012. Our goal is to be able to work
for the site full time which means at least $15,000/month in ad revenue is
needed.

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rprasad
Try reaching out to Giant Media (giantmedia.com). They match up viral
videos/targeted media ads with demographic-appropriate websites. They can help
provide some additional monetization.

