Ask HN: Can you Monetize Celebrity Gossip Sites?

[DanielBMarkham]

So I've got this blog that I've been writing in for over four years.

As part of that, a few of my pages have pictures of celebrities. What can I say? Seemed like a fun topic at the time.

These pages, for whatever reason, have become very popular -- so popular that they take up a considerable amount of bandwidth off my server. I'm probably spending 20 bucks a month to pay for people to come by and gawk at celebrity pictures.

I'm at a loss at how to continue. While traffic is nice, quite frankly these people are visiting for reasons unrelated to technology, humor, agile, or any of the other things I like talking about. They come once, see the pictures, then never come again. Hardly any ever stay. And they're not providing anything except a bill.

What to do? Delete those pages? Re-write them as landing pages for some kind of product? How do these celebrity sites work, anyway?

People say to get traffic first and then worry about the money, but what happens when the traffic you get isn't what you expected? Change the site over to something like "Naked Famous People" ?? <- Not happening.

[jsz0]

Do you own the photographs? or the rights to reproduce them? If you do not I suspect monetizing your site will put you into some legal danger.

[jacquesm]

Are they real page views or picture embeds ?

How much of it is bot traffic ?

Slap some google ads on them, $20 / month is < $1 / day, that shouldn't be too hard to do.

Naked famous people is a lot better business model than some of the ones I read about, but at the same time it may involve a lawyer or two.

Celebrity sites usually are bottom feeders, I don't think you want to be associated with them in any way shape or form.

[DanielBMarkham → jacquesm]

They're real page views. In the logs I get referrals from Google, usually people doing image searches.

I've got Google ads at the top of every page, but I'm not converting much of anything from the gawkers.

I was wondering if there was some magic -- perhaps making those pages static and rewriting them targeted just at celebrity peepers -- that would help recoup expenses? I figure these sites that just do celebrity gossip and pictures and such must be making money somehow.

I don't think text-based ads, like adwords, are going be effective for people who are primarily searching for visual stimulus. Perhaps some kind of landing page for a paid celebrity site that gives referral fees? I don't know. I'm not crazy about this entire business, and if it weren't for the bandwidth cost, I'd just ignore it. But I'm increasingly uncomfortable with paying out so much each month and getting nothing from it.

[jacquesm → DanielBMarkham]

Ok.

I agree with you on the text links, but if it was just to recoup the costs that should do it without any real work on your end.

I don't see how rewriting the pages is going to help recoup expenses, that just costs time and does not bring any cash.

Yes, celebrity sites make money, but they are also the shadiest operators when it comes to SEO, then there is the 'legal' angle.

Referral fees are usually only for sites that turn a buck, you do not wish to be seen linking to that kind of content.

It's one excellent way to kill your reputation, both 'online' in terms of PR and offline.

Maybe you could make a deal with a single website that targets the same demographic as the one that you seem to be attracting and place a single banner or such for a fixed fee per month.

http://www.affiliateranker.com/directory/

has some candidates, but it will take you a while to find something that works well. A/B testing is the key to getting an affiliate program that converts well.

[DanielBMarkham → jacquesm]

Yeah that was the answer I was afraid of. Dozens of hours spent trying to save 20 bucks. I might just delete the pages.

I agree that I don't want to get into the naked famous people biz. But being a normal person and not trying to have a tightly targeted blog means that these images are going to be part of what I like writing about from time to time. Which presents a quandary.

It would be neat if somebody could write an app that let people put up pictures of famous people as part of their blog articles and then have the pictures "expire" after a month or so. Visitors after that would have to log-in/pay/be-annoyed in order to retrieve them. I think this would allow publishers the ability to use images freely while not accumulating a lot of junk traffic.

[jacquesm → DanielBMarkham]

So how about simply adding those pages to your robots.txt file ?

[DanielBMarkham → jacquesm]

Awesome.

That was the simple solution I was looking for. Add it to robots.txt, google drops the page from it's index, random searchers go elsewhere, and Bob's your uncle.

Doh!

It's amazing how bouncing problems off other people can lead to simple solutions. That's probably best-kept secret of HN -- using "Ask HN" articles

[jacquesm → DanielBMarkham]

You're welcome. I wished my own current Ask HN post would get some traction, if not I'll have to break out the C compiler :)

[jakewolf]

Start by changing the anti aging ads on your blog to something your target readership would be interested in.