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Comment by stevesearer | Hacker News Reader

I started https://officesnapshots.com as a side project 9 years ago and it has been my full-time work for the last ~4 years.

If you don't count the cost of me, it has always been profitable as the business costs itself are pretty low. I had zero business goals at the beginning and now it is probably the most popular site in its niche (office design).

The thing most people are interested in here is that I moved from using Adsense to selling and hosting 100% of my own advertising a couple years ago. People seem to like how on-topic and relevant the ads are and that they are static graphics.

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Great idea and a nice site. I love it's simplicity, and the ads don't piss me off, which is a first. They load with the page rather than 2 seconds later, so I don't notice them in a negative way, and as you say they feel appropriate and relevant rather than trying to sell me cat toys or tents.

How was your overall experience for the swich to self-hosted ads in terms of time and money you had to invest given that the main sellingpoint for Adsense is its ease of use?

I had Adsense and self-hosted ads simultaneously for a while and had built a decent base of advertisers and contacts over the years so there wasn't much additional investment of time above what I was already doing.

Getting an advertiser on board with your program is the hard part, swapping graphics in and out is the easy part.

Very very interesting. How does revenue compare? Have you considered putting adsense ads on during traffic spikes or any similair strategies? Do you share any analytics besides impresssions/clicks/costs with advertisers?

The only time I've seen this is on my school's newspaper, and they are wildly unsuccessful.

At the time it was in my favor to switch, plus it looked weird and jarring to me to have several ads for office furniture and then one for that thing you bought on Amazon 3 months ago.

Re: traffic spikes, no. There are limited spots which can be purchased so adding more spots whenever I want wouldn't seem right to my current advertisers who bought based on the limit in place.

Edit: I also get contacted by ad networks from time to time saying I could boost my revenue, but I always ask which advertisers they have who are relevant to my audience. It is always none. So at this point, I'm relatively confident that I don't need an ad network to service my particular niche.

Are you selling by impressions or clicks or time? Did you build your own ad serving and tracking software?

Ads are priced $/month and are sold in blocks from one month all the way to 12 months.

The site is on Wordpress so I just use plugins to handle that stuff. I'm basically a publisher so Wordpress is perfect for almost anything I could need to do.

I wasn't expecting to see familiar names in this thread. I remember when you started OS! Fantastic to hear it's going so well.

Hey! Worth noting for people reading that you were responsible for some of the site's early success with your tweeting about it and it subsequently being of the front page of digg several times.

OS has changed a lot in its look and features and the audience I target, but it is essentially the same concept.

I like this, it's really really cool.

I have some questions. Who puts content in your site? Who placed content in the site at the beginning, just yourself?

How did you learn how to host your own ads?

Btw, which office design do you like the most?

The first advert was in 2007 and was probably just some html in the theme sidebar. Now I use an ad plugin for WordPress to handle the mechanics of it.

My favorite office is mine because it is well-suited to my needs :)

Is your content all provided by the design firms responsible? How did you solicit your first submissions?

The first few posts were found on Flickr browsing for Creative Commons licensed imagery, but after getting onto the first few sites like digg submissions started rolling in.

I think a year after I started the site was when my first major office design of Google's office in Stockholm was sent in by the architect. Before then the site was mostly candid tours from random people and random companies.

Edit: I think I have ~60 projects on the calendar to be published right now.

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