Inside a viral website
notfunatparties.substack.com
notfunatparties.substack.com
I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment? Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or Stripe or whatever, collect the money and declare it as donations on the IRS form? Why try all these convoluted schemes, instead of giving a straightforward way for people to tip?
They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax.
How many webpages do you read per month?
Now divide one by the other.
Paying directly for things you like on the internet doesn't seem like a big deal to us here on HN, but the overwhelming majority of people will never even consider it. Everything else is free, why should anyone have to pay for anything?
Uh, not in my experience. I haven't tried to monetize a site like this, but I would expect a CPM around 1 cent. Still, times 50 million, it isn't nothing.
CPM is cost per mille, AKA cost per thousand impressions. Revenue from 50,000,000 impressions would be CPM * 50,000.
Only then we will have proved that the vast majority of people will not pay a dime for content on the web.
That sort of feels like the core issue. Why even try to monetise a page like this?
I never thought about it like this. I always just thought of Reddit Gold as just another weird Internet quirk I will never understand.
I kind of wonder if NFTs for artwork will become the same thing. Like amplifying comments, maybe high NFT prices will be a way to amplify one artist over another in what is a very crowded marketplace.
If it's all about the icon displayed next to the comment header, I suppose that's a kind of amplification -- but it seems like less of a zero-sum game, because it's not forcing another opinion out of view.
Edit: Just checked Homebrew analytics. >10k recorded installs in the past year (low single digit number of releases during that period, no major publicity event). I don't have readily available analytics for other installation channels on macOS, or analytics for Linux and Windows which are pretty fractured. Point is the user base is sizable.
I can't remember ever hearing someone talk about how successful their donation button was. I can remember plenty of people describing how few people ever click it, though...
My own personal donation methods total $15 from one person in the past 5 years since we forked the project and started maintaining it. We have more users than many start ups do and I know that there are several companies using our software.
[1]: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink [2]: https://opencollective.com/streamlink
:D
The users are not shy about feature requests, and they're not shy about complaining that I haven't implemented their feature requests.
So I made a pledge to the userbase that if they collectively donate $1000 to the site, I'll start working on v2.
I posted that pledge to the site a year ago. Total donations: $80.
There are a couple of hundred people who use the site for hours per day and post on the forums that they love it, but haven't donated a fiver.
Asking for donations doesn't work.
Like, you can choose to have your name publicly displayed on a thank you page (this would work well with BMAC, since donations can be both anonymous and not), or have your username be of different colour or have some badge next to it.
But then again, I don't know how I would fit that into this meme page, and I'm definitely not an expert having earned a total of two euros of donations (yet to implement some reward system).
Subscriptions are the best, but obv that won’t work for a meme page.
It works, true, eg Andrew Kelley is funding his Zig work that way and it's pretty amazing to see him ace it. But damn you gotta be a particular kind of person to not get extremely stressed out about that prospect.
p.s. Not saying there are no people who didn't manage to pull it off, but I'm pretty sure those people are exceptions rather than the rule.
That was part of the original allure of Kickstarter: participants agreed to contribute money -- but they only had to pay it if the total pledged amount reached a certain threshold. That way, contributors got some assurance that they're not wasting their money and that any project they fund has some level of viability.
So maybe, in your case, you could ask the users to donate some amount of money -- but they wouldn't have to actually pay it unless you reached your $1,000 funding goal.
If you think of it as donations and you talk about it like donations, people view you as a "charity case" begging for money. Good luck with that.
If you position it as tips and payment for the value you deliver, you can turn it into money. It's not easy, it's not consistent and it's probably not a way to get rich quick.
But there are people who are successfully supporting their work with Patreon and tips as at least part of the scheme.
It takes work to get money out of people. You probably didn't do anywhere near enough to promote the idea that "We need X more money to release version 2." And you probably positioned the request for money very poorly.
Just because you didn't pull it off doesn't mean it cannot be done.
In this case you might decide to provide early access to new features for subscribers, for example.
But some of them just seem to very creatively thank you for your support. I recall reading one that waxed eloquent about how supporting them at the one dollar level would buy you a guilt-free conscience with regards to consuming their content or something like that.
Three years ago, I built an offline/online paper wallet generator[0] for what was one of the top cryptocurrencies by market cap (Stellar Lumens - XLM). I included a donation address in the footer of the page.
I've received 9 donations in those three years[1], amounting to about 12 XLM (currently $4.87). While not much, I get a kick out of the idea that 9 people liked it enough to donate.
Note, my costs are negligible and I've never received a single feature request or had to do any maintenance. The code is hosted at GitHub Pages (free) with Cloudflare (free) in front of it. The only cost to me is the domain name.
[0] https://stellarpaperwallet.com
[1] Cloudflare only gives me analytics for the last month but last month it had 1,348 unique visitors.
There are 3 other projects to which I'd like as well to donate something but they're all using different services ( https://donorbox.org , https://ko-fi.com , https://liberapay.com ) => I don't want to lose control over my donations and creating accounts there as well would have that effect on me.
Therefore, I think that somebody that would like to receive donations should try make multiple options available - hoping for the opposite (that whoever donates will use the specific service that you chose) won't work.
Any donations for this idea?
Seems like linktr.ee does a good job of aggregating links. So, the "donate" link could link to that, which then displays a bunch of options. However, I believe that a familiar icon - like the patreon icon - helps people make decisions.
I was thinking of an aggregator for the donator, i.e. something that aggregates your multiple accounts on multiple donation services.
Really odd to think that if everything worked perfectly all the time I wouldn't have made any money on this project.
In my case I donated only once to them and I understood only later that (apparently?) most of the $ isn't being used for Wikipedia, therefore as I'm not interested in their other projects I never donated anything anymore to them - they can make that banner as big&flashy as they want but the fact remains that I don't want my $ used for non-Wikipedia-related activities.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
I mention this because at the current moment, he has 4,757 patrons, and that $5/mo is the only official tier offered. That's $19k/mo, minus Patreon fees. This is the first time I've used a Patreon subscription to power a site account, which I wasn't aware could be done (I subscribe to a few web authors though, so I'm not new to Patreon). I think this is a really interesting way to provide gated site access, and it's fairly low fiction for a lot of people, because they either already use Patreon, or have at least heard of it so it's not some random site charging you or that you are paying. There's lots of benefits I see to this model, and I think if I have a project that fits it in the near future I'll try it myself. Maybe it's something that would work for you (you'd have to set the monthly price at something you think appropriate). $1 from 100 people would get you that $1000 in less than a year, and you might also get better targeted info on what features the people that are willing to pay think are more important.
I agree asking for donations doesn't work. I don't like donating like that. I am willing to allocate a bit of monthly money to people if I feel like I'm getting something worthwhile in return though (it's a limited amount, I try to keep total Patreon expenditure at or below ~$50/mo).
There's lots to unpack there that make it different than most other games I've played, but you can get a good idea from watching some Twitch streams.
It is almost a must if you're a casual player. It is too hard to keep up with the barters, flea market rates and even just the quests and items for quests.
I haven't played in a few weeks though, from a combination of the friend I usually play with being less interested (and not wanting to level/quest much without him) and being busier myself. That's sad, because it really is pretty amazing once you get the hang of it (I just stared at beginning of this wipe) and have someone to play with. Playing alone is fun too, but with one or two good friends is really something special.
I'm not sure I would consider what they do effective in banning trade bots (the captcha seems ridiculously easily beaten), I think the Found In Raid object flag is probably the really effective thing keeping most bot usage down, since it attacks the actual incentives of using a bot (it's still useful to auto-buy when markets dip or someone under lists an item, but that's about it I think, but I may be missing a use).
That said, if all you're doing is scanning the market results and not buying anything, it's probably much easier to not trigger any problems with the devs. The market data is really useful for those that like that sort of thing, but it's not really that much of an advantage, just a way for those into the economic portion of the game to go deeper.
That is, it comes with lots of advantages through being part of an ecosystem that people may already be part of or at least have some trust in because it is well known. Additionally it's already associated with helping people and projects in a way that may not be purely transactional, which fits how some people feel about their projects (thus the option to donate as discussed here).
Just because two models can be boiled down to essentially the same thing doesn't always mean they will perform equally as well. Sometimes the small distinctions and details are very important.
Depends. I have paid for things I could have gotten for free, and raised money for political organisations (not in the USA, so we could not sell laws the way the Americans do).
The best way to get money is to ask. There is a lot of research into the best ways to ask, and what gives best results.
But just asking thoughtlessly (not accusing you, no idea how you asked) does not work
Using the methods I outline.
Not proof, but I have experience and I tell you, done properly donations can be very lucrative.
In games, people will buy so many visual improvements that add nothing but glam to their character.
Discord does... something, I can't remember what exactly, with their "turbo" and IIRC it costs discord cents, but the user pays dollars.
People will pay for the dumbest things. Give them a reason to sign up, add some kind of paid interaction that changes something visual or makes a dumb sound, add some tier system with context relevant names, and people might really pay.
Someone suggested I productise it but I thought, based on the donations, that it wouldn’t have many purchasers. But they were right: it earned orders of magnitude more when some features required a one time payment to be unlocked, versus donation.
It can work. It just depends on how strong your community is.
When I lived in Houston, I was a member of a local discussion forum that was on a .info domain. One day, a domain squatter offered to sell the .com version to the sysop for $15,000. The regular users pitched in, and got the money together in a few weeks.
People donated over $130k to Tarn and Zach Adams in 2020 (creators of Dwarf Fortress). Upon saying that, that's their sole source of income. I think a lot of players are aware that if they don't donate, Dwarf Fortress will never be finished. Well, it never will anyway but...
But Tarn actively gives updates on his work, creates podcasts, and participates in the forum, and has been doing that for more than a decade. I'm not sure if he still does it, but if you donated, he'd draw you a picture and send it to you in the post. I've still got mine from 10 years ago.
Or maybe Morse Code people are just cheapskates.
I signed up for Patreon to support one member, but its so easy to add/remove people to the monthly dole that I’m now up to $40/mo. I know you’re not asking for advice here but maybe something like that would be worth a shot if you haven’t tried already.
(I know that clientele though, so maybe Patreon isn’t the best route lol)
Donations are about 1% of my income. They are a complete waste of time.
IMHO that is a fallacy. Although %0.01 looks like a really small number there's no reason for it for not being %0.001 or %0.000001. When people do napkin math , it's a common theme to say that "If we only capture %1 of the market we would be $$$rich$$$" and they proceed to find out that there are smaller percentiles than %1.
To receive donations people need to be sympathetic to you or your cause. You need to actively sell it, making it a considerable part of the user experience.
It's really hard to build that relationship with just one visit. Maybe there are visitors deeply invested in the situation and they may actually obsess with your product but you need to look into the analytics to see if it's the case. If there are visitors that appear to be visiting extremely frequently, you need to explore ways to ask for the money and for that you will need data(profiles of the visitors) to develop your message however the OP doesn't do detailed analytics and profiling. It could be possible to monetise it and even catch a few whales but chances are that you can also alienate those people with the wrong messaging, so you probably will need to do personalisation which requires data and cookies and what not, which means data collection and sharing permission popups.
Of course you can try your chances and pick a group of people that you believe are using your product and proceed with A/B testing etc instead of profiling. If you happen to choose the privacy nerds as a target you will find out how much the privacy nerds like donating.
Email spam works exactly this way. I think what you are pointing out correctly, is that the percentage might be incorrect; the principle is not.
Spam’s success rate would be dictated by the percentage of the people who want the product in the general population after passing through the spam delivery funnel.
With the donations it’s completely different mechanism.
Nevertheless, the fallacy is that small looking number of market share is the smallest possible market share.
There’s nearly 8,000,000,000 humans, so there’s a ton of variety that one can’t even imagine, but probably none of them want to eat a bar of soap for breakfast each day even if you think there must be some rare 1 in 1,000,000 out there.
Putting 1 in BIG NUMBER is just a way we abstract away hard and intimidating questions.
Perhaps. But at least that's just on paper. Resorting to advertising means actually forgetting your visitors are people.
/s
But yeah 1/1000 people are not going to randomly pay for something with a market price of $0.
It just isn't how web audiences operate. I'm not saying that it is a bad idea - paying for good content could solve many problems. It just isn't where we are today.
0.01% is a fantasy, massively high conversion rate, just so you know.
You're correct, but reality doesn't agree. It has been proven time and time again that 0.01% almost always DON'T leave a dollar for anything.
>They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax.
Currently ads are the easiest way to monetize a not-well-known web property in the short-term. Long-term you can build a brand/trust/community/etc and leverage that into patreon/donations.
A website I live from generates about 50€ per month in donations.
If it wasn't a simple meme website to spend 5 seconds on and never visit again, it would not have gotten 50 million views. Trying to monetize that is like squeezing blood from a stone.
I imagine that's one reason why he's posting this from a Substack domain.
Also, one thing I learned on the website was that having 20 million views on your website does not equate to a consistent amount of money because the ads don't pay the sam e in every country.
For example, I had some ads pay $20CPM and some that paid $0.00001 because they were fillers, so I had to tweak my low fillers by signing up with local country ad networks who could provide better CPMs.
In the end, it still did not evolve into a large shift and the average was still lower, good but not great.
I think that these days, running your own website is good, you might still get 50MM views but not much income because ads are still not going to give you the best returns which is why some or more websites are shifting to a paywall. For the most time, everyone was good with ads, because that was what worked. Now it's paywalls and it will trend that way because they get the most value and a consistent payment that way (not many cancel active subscriptions over a period of time). Ads will still play significant amount of money for direct sellers like Google, Facebook, Twitter & Amazon, but not for third party sites who will have to find different ways.
There is also the upgrades to search engines and facebook/twitter etc to now keep you on their own website for everything and corner a full $$ vs paying third party websites a cut, which is why we see snippets etc in search engines and then people engage there more and click on a higher paying ad to them.
Also, there is ad-blockers, which means you are not getting any impressions on some percentage of the visitors in the first place.
Anyone else find this a pretty gross violation of privacy on Amazon’s part? Why should your unrelated purchases be disclosed to affiliates just because you clicked an affiliate link for whatever reason? Let’s say the affiliate website use accounts or know the identities of users through another channel, and track outbound clicks. With few enough clicks, they can exactly correlate your unrelated purchases with you, if I understand this correctly. In fact it seems you can easily prank unsuspecting acquaintances this way.
To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting commission on random stuff.
Edit: I can also see why the data could be valuable to marketers.
Also, imagine it's not Amazon but a much smaller website. Just bringing a client (someone who actually paid) is already a good deal.
So, I believe it's a totally fair commission rule.
> To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting commission on random stuff.
The problem is disclosing random purchases. You can pay a commission without that disclosure.
/s
Works anywhere else where the audience can be identified, and click frequency is low.
As the affiliate, the insights are invaluable. Imagine you hosted a sleep blog and directed people to a particular memory foam pillow. If you saw they ended up purchasing a different pillow, you could change the link to better serve your readers.
Or if you saw that they ended up purchasing essential oils, perhaps you’d want to write a post about using oil diffusers to fall asleep.
The affiliate link tracking is supposed to give you a better picture of your audience. Usually it works, but getting 50M views from every source on the internet is obviously a case where there’s no common “audience”.
The site owner only sees that 35 people bought book X while 24 people bought book Y.
If someone runs a tiny blog that they attempt to monetize with affiliate links, and one of their only readers at the moment is their mother, I don't think they'd be happy seeing that one of their readers purchased a sex toy.
If I buy a memory foam pillow from company B instead of company A then I don't want company A to know at all. If I wanted company A to know then I would tell company A why I didn't purchase its product.
Maybe it was that I didn't see company A's product. Or maybe it's because company A is a piece of garbage. Maybe it's because company A employs deceptive practices and I don't want to give company A my money.
[1] By "honest", I mean like a pop-up with a question or two and a clear "Not now" button. Not another cookie banners or passive collection.
And then said browser extension, which promised to never ever sell your data to a third party, got bought out by PayPal for 4 billion USD.
Really makes you think.
I guess selling the whole company owning the data isn't technically selling data to third parties...
Law enforcement.. What do you want them to do? Turn down a legal court order and say "naaa"?
Why not? The alternative is to allow a business model, in which you start a company with the sole purpose of vacuuming up data and delivering it to highest bidder by getting acquired.
Have a transition window (say 3 months) before the sale goes into effect where users get to choose to either keep the account and allow the new owner access to the data, or to have their data destroyed. After that window, data from anyone who didn't respond gets deleted.
Go to jail or shutdown the site, like the Lavabit guy.
>We know how important your personal data is to you, so we will never sell it. We'll only share it with your consent or in ways you'd expect (as we explain here). That means we will share your data if needed to complete your purchase, with businesses who help us operate Honey, or if we are legally required to do so.
>We may also share information in the following cases:...with our parent company, PayPal, Inc. and affiliates and subsidiaries it controls, but only for purposes allowed by this Privacy Policy;
So that sounds like commercial use of personal data is specifically protected with regards to the new parent. The policy does specify they can share your data in an "aggregate or anonymized format" without any caveats, though.
Sure does still raise the question of what PayPal spent $4bn on. From what I can read online, online retailers see a lot of benefit from the way Honey incentivizes users to complete a purchase instead of abandon the cart.
I think the weasel is this nibble here:
> but only for purposes allowed by this Privacy Policy;
The privacy policy is between the user and Honey, not the user and PayPal, which implies they are still legally separate entities ("parent company"). Unless Honey has an agreement with Paypal that it can audit and enforce - which as a subsidiary, why would it want to - then once PayPal has the data, its actual use of it is governed by the privacy policy between the user and PayPal if there is an existing relationship or ???
It sounds like all Honey and Paypal need to do is find a half plausible justification from the PP for the data transfer; once it's handed over, Paypal is basically free to do whatever it wants.
Luckily, Amazon scrubs any identifying info from their affiliate reports. So say I post an affiliate link to a book and then look in Google Analytics to see 50 readers clicked the link. The next day, I can log into Amazon's report and see I had 50 clicks and 30 sales of the book along with an addition sale of 40 toys, 10 movies, and 3 dildos.
However, I can't actually see which of my 50 readers bought what, if anything. Those 3 dildo purchases are completely anonymized, along with everything else. However, being told I also sold 40 toys really helps me because it lets me know I should probably start writing more about toys since that's what my readers are buying.
I'm also limited to 200 unique Amazon "tags", so I can't assign a unique tag to each of my readers to track them individually.
Question about "Ads/advertisements" (I'm totally clueless about how they work):
Does anybody have a link pointing to some kind of overview from the point of view of a website owner? (e.g. list of different providers, amounts paid by views/clicks, which informations are/can be exchanged with them to provide for example an ad in the same context of what the website is showing, etc...?)
Personally as a user, I would not be against ads if they would be normal ones like in a newspaper/magazine, but many show full-fledged small&big animations => I get angry when I see my CPU usage at 100%/my fan spinning up/my battery depleting while reading on such a page, which is the main if not the only reason why I block them (I might even be interested in them, but they screw up my PC/notebook) => as a website owner do you have control on what kind of ads you want to show (technically speaking - like "animated" vs. "static", with how many fps, etc...)?
Also this part of the ads.google.com site https://ads.google.com/intl/en_NZ/home/resources/advanced/ has a reasonable amount of stuff within it but obviously only from a Google point of view. I don't suppose it matters but that's the NZ version of the page, probably only the 0800 number is specific to NZ but you might change en_NZ to whatever your language code is.
That was an opportunity, to cache the map as an image, and switch it later to the proper map.
Seems to me the best monetisation he could do is selling himself. Even a couple hours work off the back of it would have been beating any ad's etc.
I had a minor web hit in the 90s, tried to do affiliate links etc but nothing really worked but I did get a little bit of work from it that has been indirectly the launch pad for a few side projects. None made me rich but they've all been a step forward.
And it was quite easy to do back in the early days of the Internet. I ran one such site in the early 2000s, which attracted 30 million page views per month at its peak.
Like the author, I kept trying all kinds of things to monetize it, at the end affiliate programs and google Adsense worked the best.
[1] https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_sour...
Does HN show viewing stats for comments? Might be nice for the sites featured on it to know.
The results:
- 250 upvotes
- 101 comments
- 6,675 site views (over the 1.5 days it was frontpage)
Viral or click bait stuff on "hot" topics can foster a lot of insubstantive and often fighty comments. That's a known phenomenon on the site.
From no traffic to 10+ million visitors and being featured on late night talk shows. It was 6 lines of JavaScript and took 20 minutes to build but peaked at making $5,000 a day from ads.
I ended up chatting with its creator on how he built and hosted it at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/35-determine-what-yo....
But since then it looks like he transferred the site to someone else because now it's an e-commerce shop instead of a toilet paper calculator like it once was.
This guy is such a good sport. Unsolicited and impolite random critics of your tech stack on Twitter: fun.
Yes. It's not relevant to this discussion. The author did not need to mint an NFT and there was clearly no real demand for one.
Creating an NBA NFT and then managing the ongoing bids will produce orders of magnitude more CO2 than selling a souvenir ball.
Quartz recently published a good breakdown comparing selling and shipping a print vs selling an NFT https://qz.com/1987590/the-carbon-footprint-of-creating-and-...
That'll really boil down on a discussion of power sources (there were a few threads on this last week). Basically, how much power does it use, is this power to spare, what's the percentage of renewable energy etc..
The more fashionable term is Single Serving Site[0], and is a phrase originally coined by Jason Kottke.
You can find more of these types of sites here: https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/
- Next.js aims for "pit of success" in building sites with React that are optimized for CDNs and small builds
- Deploying said sites to Vercel takes advantage of the CDNs, so most of the users are getting cached data.
So, for this site, I would assume:
- There is no backend - All the HTML is cached and contains a static generation of the page(s)
- The javascript is also cached
- Vercel CDN is fast.
That's it!
So there are a lot more servers much closer to people using your site. Pushing a new copy from “you” to each edge server is pretty straightforward. I imagine Vercel does it pretty quickly, but sometimes the edge server could poll for changes maybe once a minute, which is pretty cheap to do.
- Next.js makes it dead-easy to statically generate your pages using various strategies. And static pages take few resources to serve. [0]
- It also gives you lots of info on bundle sizes, performance, and provides you with the tools to manage these.
- Vercel is optimised to serve these static pages on their CDN. [1] And your project quite literally a single terminal command away from being live.
- Both are very easy to get started with and a joy to use.
- I am in no way affiliated with Vercel. I just like their products.
I don't quite understand, what was sold here exactly? You can't sell the DNS since ".com" doesn't exist on the blockchain (you could for a NameCoin domain, but who uses that). So is it like a capture of the source code? Or is it really just a token saying "istheshipstillstuck.com"?
I can sort of get NFTs when it's about selling digital artwork since it's a way for the artist to generate artificial scarcity for something that's technically endlessly copiable and it creates a notion of what's "the original". After all, IP laws and regulations are full of that stuff (cue the "what colour are your bits" essay).
But here there's already a digital token that's unique and can be auctioned: the domain name itself. It's pretty obvious to me that the "true" istheshipstillstuck.com will be whoever owns the DNS, not some random person with an NFT token.
> a way for the artist to generate artificial scarcity
The art isn't stored on-chain, so it's not scarce either.
All the NFT is is a pointer that has some text about who created it and what it points to. Not sure why why that pointer itself is valuable except as a status of "i am the only one that owns this unique pointer".
Of course there's nothing stopping anyone from creating another pointer that points to the same thing as the one you just bought and selling that.
So unless you find some value in pointers, intrinsically in themselves, NFT's are useless.
It’s the pet rock of 2021.
> Link to a print-ready high-resolution image file will be unlocked on purchase (2048 x 2048 pixels).
LOL
(Except you don't want your art to be printed in a reasonable size.)
This question applies to all NFTs! All you 'own' is a smart contract on a blockchain. That contract might contain a URL, and that URL might have some content on it. Or it could be a broken link. But you definitely do not own the thing that the URL points to. Nor do you have any guarantee that there are no other NFTs on the blockchain using that same URL.
Luckily enough for the scammers/sellers, the buyers don't seem to care about these details!
I assumed that the art itself would be stored into the blockchain, which would give it some form of permanence.
I'm starting to consider creating a NFT to sell NFTs of NFTs emitted elsewhere. Or one for people who doesn't "own an asset" to sell it.
When the signer matches the creator (e.g. beeple selling NFTs of his art, this guy selling an NFT of his site), the interesting part isn't really the thing, but the signature.
Could this be a pyramid scheme? From my (very limited) understanding of the technology, it is basically a single-sell item - so the value you get out of it does not depend on whether they take off or cease to exists post-buy. A pyramid doesn't really fit to this. Or am I missing something?
I'm used to applying "pyramid scheme" to "i buy this thing not cause I want it but just hoping I can sell it to someone else for more money later, and they're going to be doing the same thing as me." Cause that is likely to leave someone holding the bag. But I guess that is an overlapping phenomenon that may not be the same as a pyramid scheme.
What do we call that phenomenon? Just "capitalism"?
I ran a site that was popular on a niche subreddit in 2013-2014 which had Amazon affiliate links. On the very first day when the site was the top post, the resulting affiliate commissions were over $500. And most of them were not for products that were linked to on the site. The lifetime commissions earned was about $11K from a total of maybe 100K unique visitors. The biggest contributor to the commissions were unrelated expensive purchases that visitors made later on Amazon. I’m curious if the affiliate program changed in the 8 years since.
I thought that modern browsers required a direct user-interaction to cause a new tab to appear, such as a click. I thought this was how we got out of the pop-up hell of the 90s?
So what happened was that the site opened in a tab, people didn't get to it immediately so when they got around to it the timer had fired and they were rickrolled.
This whole thread is about how asking for donations is a big fail online.
Yet, there's no lack of street performers in most major metros. Whether that is people in superhero costumes on Hollywood Blvd, or street dancers in times square, they all seem to be doing fine off donations.
There is something about the online "free duplicate copy" concept that just makes value dissappear
They may be doing fine, but I bet that, for most, donations aren't their only source of income and they probably have another job.
We're a social species that evolved in tribes. Street performers probably do a better job of stimulating that sense of tribe than abstract interactions on a web page do.
All websites are not comparable to Times Square or Hollywood Blvd, in terms of how much attention they get. You also don't see performers in 99.99% of cities, even in other areas of the same city like NYC and LA.
Of course we know these services aren't really free; Google and Facebook still run their services on physical servers that have hosting costs. But by making their apps free and finding alternative revenue streams (i.e. selling data), they can set norms that harm competitors with less capital while making it easier to adopt new users (and collect more data).
Also, what would be the gain if he did normal ads?
I didn't mention in the post, but I had a couple of random ad offers, but they were for things that I didn't really agree with so didn't take up any of the offers.
How is it possible that it's not you again who posted this on HN?
One time I experienced a "trending topic" first (or second)hand; the app we were building accidentally sent a pair of test notifications to 2-3 million people, first the test message, then a second saying "zodat Hajo het ook gelooft" (so that Hajo (name) believes it too). That took the daytime internet by storm; news articles, radio segments, twitter trending topic, etc.
I mainly followed the topic on Twitter, and before long there were adverts on there selling swag related to the trending topic. There's companies (or even bots?) scanning Twitter, making swag-on-demand for trending topics.
Besides that, the author did mention several things he tried besides ad monetization. I think the most effective thing would have been to either find an opportunistic brand that wants to advertise here (like a maritime company or something) for like $25 CPM+, or to quickly find somebody to sell it to if you have those kinds of connections that trust you already. Lots of people trying to build businesses based off of a network of "micro sites".
Almost perfect.
So many are saying that this could've been a static site distributed by a CDN. That's what a Next.js app on Vercel does by default! Unless you use `getServerSideProps`, Next.js will create a static site at build time and when deployed to Vercel it will be hosted on their CDN. Spending just a bit of time to understand why Next.js is so popular would've made that clear to most people here. But I guess that's not as easy as just criticizing it for bloat without knowing how it works and moving on?
(More things should render their basic, static-site content without having to exec js, too.)
The web would be a lot better if this were the case.
[1] https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/custom-document
> In my day job, we use Next.js for almost everything we build. It’s a framework built on top of React that just strips out almost all the complexity of building fairly complicated websites. Obviously, this wasn’t a complicated website, but I went with what I’m most familiar with.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail :D
Edit to say that I think it's an amazing little wholesome project and the author's very funny. Didn't want my comment to sound too harsh. :)
I also think the process explanation was very enjoyable.
In the end, it was a static page that handled an incredible amount of traffic.
Using code to generate static sites is not new or particularly interesting. We have been caching PHP and Perl sites so that they are "static" since the dawn of the web. CDNs are really really old now. It feels like a new batch of developers don't know that caching is a thing and "static" is a hot buzzword.
In no way am I saying the only reason for learning is business—there's plenty of intrinsic value. But all that learning has to subsidized with something...
From a business perspective, there's a good chance there's more than a handful of earning opportunities right under each of our very noses every day. The key is to find the ones that align with our strengths, personalities, skillsets, etc...
It works - i can pop out sites that work in a mall amount of time. They will never be istheshipstillstuck.com-famous or cnn.com-loaded, or never be used in some countries where loading 10 MB of JS is a problem.
they are used by me, on my 1000/400 Mbps connection, or by my children on a LAN.
So having a hammer that works-sort-of-always-but-not-optimal is better than having a stupendous ultra-refined tool that is the exact fit for the work - but requires 100 hours to learn and 430 pages of docs translated by Google from Swahili to French.
cd hello
quasar dev
→ I have a page and a dev server
After adding a few lines I have the components all in the right place.
quasar build
→ I have my static page
One line changed, I have a PWA
I will not do a PhD in development, I need to have simple reactive apps quickly.
Of course I could have use HTML/CSS/JS and write everything from scratch (been there, done that). Of course they will load 2 x faster, so I will not have to wait the 200 ms I do now.
Development today is so much easier. When I started 30 years ago it was truly an adventure. Today my children are coding simple stuff after one afternoon of showing them.
So yay to the frameworks, modules and others things that help people who just wish to build something fast.
Have you ever bought furniture or do you start by taking your axe and visiting the nearest forest?
The web platform itself is a framework that consumes static HTML and CSS and calls into your JS. Preferring a higher-level framework for web apps when that is available is no different than preferring a higher level language even though ASM is available for local apps.
> It’s worth pointing out that for all the criticism, the Next.js + Vercel combination meant that I didn’t have to worry about scaling the site at any point. There were millions of hits, and sometimes thousands per second, and it all just worked. The basic page continued to load in less than half a second under all that load.
Static sites have that too.
This could have been a 20kb html page on a CDN or on GitHub. But I don't work in web dev so maybe my mind just doesn't go to these lengths immediately.
In the OP he comes off pretty well, just a guy looking to experiment and do something fun, see what happened, try different things. (If he had been serious about revenue generation and prepared, I am pretty sure he could have made a lot more money from this with that many impressions; that wasn't his focus).
You can experiment and do something fun irresponsibly (trolling) or responsibly (caring about the user experience and accuracy, not trying to rip anyone off), it sounds like he did it pretty responsibly. (I guess the rickroll is a bit grey area!) I also appreciate him sharing the details transparently. Assuming his story in the OP is truthful, which I think it probably is.
[I think NFT's are really dumb, I think it was kind of a funny joke to have an NFT there, and interesting to see his report-back about the process of issuing an NFT. There aren't a lot of people being transparent about their experience with NFTs!]
... It was at this point in the read that I got very excited and broke away from the article to research "NFTs"[1] - because I've been known to create digital art[2] and I've even written a JS library to help people create digital art[3] (kinda). Luckily I got interrupted during my research and, once the interruption completed, I returned to the article rather than my research tabs - which were closed pretty quickly after the read completed.
> Most of the things I’ve posted [to Twitter] are liked exclusively by my colleagues, my Mum and my ex-flatmate. It’s screaming into the void.
My Mother doesn't do social media. I doubt she'd approve of the words I choose to scream.
[1] https://www.creativebloq.com/features/what-are-nfts - "NFTs use a monster amount of energy in their creation. So much so that many protesters are worried about the very real impact the craze could have on the environment" ... this is seriously scary; it puts me off the whole idea of trying to monetise my creative work in this way.
[2] https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv - my collection of generative art on CodePen