Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cherian | Hacker News Reader

I can speak for the food blogging industry. This is my wife’s blog[1]

A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4[2]. Where it gets interesting are the RPM numbers. If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks and become a preferred partner, you can rake up to $12-15in RPM [3]. Here’s more of multiple revenue sources for a successful blog [4]

Caveat: Things take off once you cross around 700—800K US traffic. Until then it can be frustrating.

[1]: https://alittlebitofspice.com/

[2]: http://d.pr/i/bIBobD

[3]: http://d.pr/i/Qvk1M

[4]: http://d.pr/i/dEqpvA

View on HN

Your top right logo is 2.3meg https://www.alittlebitofspice.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03...

It can be much smaller and still get the 'retina' effect, saving load time and bandwidth.

Thank you. Re-uploading.

Very refreshing to see a food blog that's recipe oriented. I'll be trying some of those! When I see a picture of mouth watering food, I want the recipe, not paragraphs of fluff about what the author did that week.

FWIW, that fluff is what builds a relationship with readers and for a lot of food blogs that's what separates you from powerhouses like seriouseats. You can usually just jump down to the recipe card if you want to skip the fluff.

Wow I had no idea food blogging was a profitable thing. Congrats to your wife.

> If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks

Isn't that impossible to get 100% filled? I recall reading a while back that getting even 40% was challenging which is why the ad quality online has gone down and they're more intrusive?

Lots of interesting stuff on this thread, thanks for sharing.

If the internet has taught me anything, it's you can make a lot of money at anything if you work hard enough.

And long enough. It's a lot of survival until you learn enough to make money.

There are a lot of companies that help you do this. Examples: http://www.adthrive.com/, https://www.mediavine.com/

Edit: The money takes more than 6 years of hard work and a lot of content, social media management, brand building, sponsored writing, quality photography, now byte-size videos etc.

Food blogging is an enormous market. The best foodies don't get money from Adsense though, it's through sponsorship/affiliate deals, books if they hit it big.

It's quite a stereotyped field though, and I would imagine it's a saturated market. Everyone wants to be like Deliciously Ella [1]. Don't even try unless you have a studio setup for the photography. Lots of food authors are pivoting towards more (usually female oriented) "lifestyle" blogs which happen to have recipes.

A lot of food blogs target healthy eating, or niche diets like keto/paleo. There are also tons of specialist food blogs covering bread, cakes, etc.

[1] https://deliciouslyella.com/

You are right. We have around $3000 worth of lighting equipment, lens, etc. But we acquired them along the way.

Sponsored content is a good chunk of money (close to 30% every mom) but its nonscalable.

Can you elaborate some more on this? What kind of equipment and resources for learning more about this?

try googling 'photography equipment'

Typically: DSLR, large aperture normal zoom lens, 2 or more external strobes, softboxes, reflectors, tripods, and flash triggers.

Have a look at Strobist which is specifically aimed at flash photography.

Otherwise just look in photo or recipe books, food blogs and shamelessly steal until you get the hang of layout.

There are a lot of blogging categories that are surprisingly profitable but in different ways. The internet is quite vast!

> A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4

You're taking a risk here.

By mentioning this, a good fraction of the 300K Hacker News daily uniques will visit your site as I did, and some may be gourmands. Excellent uncluttered presentation and mouth-watering photography by the way.

On the other hand, you tipped off the largest gathering of highly motivated, entrepreneurial web developers to a business idea that no one expected to be so profitable.

If a lot of people copy him, probably he will make a lot more of money.

I think it's been proven this fear is overstated. Startup ideas are rarely stolen.

Not startup ideas but my app ideas was stolen twice and my competitor (was friend, ex-friend now) got more resources and beaten me out of market. I don't share app idea with friend now.

In addition to what owebmaster said, and no offense, but if some random person takes it up they will probably do it shittier and get significantly fewer unique visitors.

I expect OP enjoys and is knowledgeable about the subject. They are married (content and tech) so they get to pool results. If you paid someone who was passionate about it there will be turnover. If you do it on your own just for the money and you aren't passionate and knowledgeable the site will just suck.

It's not that easy to get visitors and if they are paying out like that then there is probably plenty of room for additional actors.

If only people would work hard as my wife, be relentlessly passionate and marginally improve routinely...

i don't get it how do all you guys get so much traffic you talk about 100k's and millions of people visiting your web sites how do you make that happen?!?

Keep on writing content where you can be good (it all starts with the passion). Healthy Desserts, Everyday 30-minute cooking, Asian cooking for Americans, etc. Learn from Google what the audience intent is, improve your content. Do this for four years; you’ll get 300K/month. Then there’s SEO, Pinterest optimization [1], better photography, Lightroom skills, video shooting & editing, etc. You’ll learn this along the way. After that, there’s a good chance traffic will compound.

But you have to show up at 5 AM every day (I can’t find that Kobe Bryant quote)

[1]: https://in.pinterest.com/janerosep/a-little-bit-of-spice-fro...

How often was it updated?

Then there’s SEO, Pinterest optimization [1], etc. You’ll learn this along the way.

Don't be so sure about that. People who are telling you "I can't imagine" are probably failing to get much traffic. I don't have that kind of traffic on anything and I boggle at the idea of getting it.

So, a bit more detail and resource links would be appreciated. If a few blurbs were going to do it, then people wouldn't be asking you.

Here’s Neil Patel doing for a different vertical [1]. That article and the commenters from there can take you a long way. FWIW, don’t jump on to these things without following the links and spending a month or more researching. Writing is hard. And you have to produce around 4-10 pieces of audience intended content every month.

When we started, we didn’t care about the traffic. We did it because we loved it.

Content updating happens every year or during vacations when we get bored or when we learn a new technique. For example, when we learned that good photographs increase the CTR by 10x, my wife started learning photography. When we learned that Pinterest optimized vertical images get 5x+ CTR [2], we implemented that a year back. There are many Facebook groups for these discussions.

[1] https://www.quicksprout.com/2015/05/11/how-im-going-to-achie... [2] https://in.pinterest.com/pin/527554543833038696/

Content ... content ... content. Content is the key here.

No matter how much SEO optimization you will put into a website if the content is bad or not regularly updated (at least 2 - 3 times per week) you won't grow enough to see a significant revenue.

>We’re not on this stage just because of talent or ability, we’re up here because of 4 a.m

[I don't know if he said it, that's what I have in mind attributed to him]

If i want to make a dish that needs exotic ingredients why cant i find a link to say.. Amazon or somewhere else?

There are no ads on her site though....

And you don't happen to run an adblocker?

I disabled uBlock, still can't see any ads. Weird.

Also, uBlock tells me it only blocked two analytics scripts, no ads.

When they said that the next generation of advertising was going to be invisible I didn't quite know what to make of it, I guess this is it :) Good CPM and totally untraceable. I could get used to this.

Next thing you know you're buying things online in your sleep.

We are switching ad publishers.

Are you the owner of Cucumbertown ?

Was. Sold it [1].

[1]: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/japan...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com