Don't believe the notion that making 100 websites that earn $1 a day is easier than making 1 website that makes $100 a day. It's not.
Create value, make users want to stick around, iterate, grow.
Create value, make users want to stick around, iterate, grow.
If this can make $1 in 1 day on an evening's work, how far can I get if it's actually a GOOD site?
Feedback from where people see the areas of concern is useful. I've already read "Load time" in the comments as well as "game quality" and "exclusive content"
Load time is one thing I'd not considered. I think the images must load quickly for me because I've got them all in my browser cache.
I've changed the default sort order of the games so you're much less likely to get 'crap' on your first click than you were when they were random - but I'm working on adding categories as we speak, that way people will be able to find their genre quickly.
Thanks for the feedback :)
if everyone is coming in from search, it depends how many people are searching.
I have a few content sites that drive about $10CPM, but even with #1 organic ranking, I'm limited to about 1500 visitors a month. 95% of my traffic is from search. 99% of my revenue is from people that found my site from search.
generally, as far as adsense goes, the common wisdom is that repeat users do not drive advertising revenue. it's the search hoppers that are the ones that often click on the ads. making the site sticky doesn't necessarily mean more adsense revenue, and here is probably where other advertising mechanisms that require high number of impressions would start to come into play.
affiliate marketing might be something to look into as a supplemental as well, although i'm not sure what that is in your market.
(On the other hand, the site is self-sustaining; I don't have to think about it much.)
In response to FreeRadical: It's all about the point of diminishing returns. I spent 6 years on my first site, and it's a huge amount of work with literally thousands of manhours put into it. Just a month ago I launched another site, intended to be a minimum viable product that I can just develop and leave, and it's working out OK thus far. Don't get me wrong, the first is very much successful (2MM+ pageviews a month), but that's thousands of hours I could have put into making multiple other sites, each making a lot less but relatively more.
How?
I'd really like to see the stats on that.
Every time someone tells me that they spent (small amount of hours) on a website that (makes more than $1 a day) they are exaggerating to the extreme by not including advertising, hosting, domain expenses and maintenance time.
1) I met someone who is running a site that took him a few hours to build, cents to run (AppEngine) (plus $20 for two domain names) and makes over $1000/month (yeah, so he's spent more time since then, but not much.)
2) I build a site that cost me $15 to build ($10 domain hosting, $5 - refundable - to join an affiliate program), hours to build (it's basically a blog on Wordpress) and makes me nearly $200/month.
I can't say I'm an expert, but one way to duplicate this is to find a vertical problem domain with a lot of interest (ie, busy forums), find some problem they have (often it's some kind of calculation that people always have trouble with) and build a crappy, ugly tool to do it for them. Make the calculation URL addressable, then put a short note in a forum saying what you've done and follow up by using it in a few discussions.
Not much in in Javascript - just the part that displays the ad. All the intelligence is on the server, mostly in Java.
If you are dealing with physical products then affiliate programs can work quite well.
Edit: On my friend's site is is all AdSense. His is non-physical product related.
A while back there was this post about launching a minimally viable product in 3 hours. http://blog.amirkhella.com/2010/09/21/the-story-of-keynotopi... 3 hours and he's making money! What am I doing wrong?
Nothing. Take a look around his site. He is already an extensive expert in the field of user experience, with numerous successes under his belt. I am sure those successes were the product of a lot of education and years and years of hard work. He already has quite a following on his blog due to those successes. There was a lot that went on before he could start marketing something and sell it right off the bat.
Last summer I saw Michael Franti in concert. You may know him as the overnight success that had the song "Say Hey" if you listen to pop radio at all. (It has been in numerous TV shows, a Corona commercial, It was one of the songs played during Oprah's last show, etc.) I happen to know him as an artist who traveled from festival to festival year in and year out. Sometimes playing to a couple hundred people. Even before success, he was a world traveler, has played with indigenous people in the bush of third world countries with no electricity. He was a successful spoken word performer and has been in several bands that rose and fell long before he current lineup. I think he had released about 10 or 11 albums with various groups with virtually no mainstream success before the album that included Say Hey. At the concert I saw him at, he mentioned the press he was getting at being an overnight success and added, "yeah, with 20 years in the making."
So I guess you could say that Michael probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars for singing that 3 minute song. But there was a lot that went on in his life to get him there.