Hacker News Reader

Comment by evan_ | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine shared his strategy with me: find some big uninteresting data set from the government or whatever, figure out some way to make it interesting for regular people, and build a nice interface to it.

For instance, turning old real estate and immigration records into an ancestry site.

Monetizing it is still an issue...

View on HN

There's a lot of stuff in this space that hasn't been done yet, but that's for a very good reason. First of all, it doesn't pass the toothbrush test: it's the type of thing that's super valuable the first time you visit but you don't really need to come back to it over and over.

Second big problem: SEO. Search engines like long form written content, they don't know how to value tools that slice and dice data: they simply don't see any value in it and you'll never get SEO from it.

That's similar to Matthew Lesko's strategy (AKA question mark guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lesko)

Many of his books consisted of freely available government publications.

This reminds me of city-data.com

It is an ugly looking site, the forums are full of nasty comments, but it is still useful at some level I guess. They claim to get millions of page views. Not sure how much money they make, but they have been around for more than a decade

https://www.northdata.de/ Did something like that: Crawl public registries for companies, parse changes to them and build a graph out of it. Very cool!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com