Hacker News Reader

Comment by twox2 | Hacker News Reader

Who would pay $1 for getting a chuckle out of a meme? Also 50 million views is not 50 million visitors. If he had a normal ad monetization channel in place, he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM and walked away with at least $5k from his 15 minutes of fame. The problem is that learning as you go makes it a little too late to monetize the peak. There are companies whose entire business is in pumping out viral sites like this. Some explode for a a little while and others never make a penny. You can bet your butt that in the hands of someone who does this professionally these 50 million views would have been thousands and thousands of dollars.

View on HN

> Who would pay $1 for getting a chuckle out of a meme?

That sort of feels like the core issue. Why even try to monetise a page like this?

In the article he mentioned this; he was worried about the hosting costs. Thankfully his host got a laugh out of it and donated the hosting cost and he has in turn donated any proceeds.

Right, but if you're incurring significant hosting costs for a static site in 2021 then you're doing something wrong.

unless you have images?

Cloudflare Pages[0] claims to have unlimited bandwidth, even for their free tier.

0. https://pages.cloudflare.com/#plans

In hindsight, you're right. And obviously I didn't. However at the time, it was the uncertainty as a result of never having done something like this that made me worried.

If you can build a PaaS around it like Giphy and sell user data, sure.

Yeah but Giphy's a full on product, not just a static single page site.

Hosting costs money. Although for someone who's go-to stack for a meme website is NextJS + React could probably afford to fork over $70 for 15 minutes of Internet fame.

Hosting costs pennies (if even that) if you’re just serving static html content.

> he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM

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.

> 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.

Thanks for specifying this. There's a typo/arithmetic error in the original comment, which led me to assume CPM must mean 'per 100'.

It's tough as an individual that's just dipping their toes into the water, but if you have some experience, then you typically have an optimized setup with partners in place, etc.

In the grim future of 2050, we have finally implemented micropayments on the Internet, down to amounts as tiny as a thousandth of one cent and trending downward as we account for hyperinflation of other currencies. Advanced technologies, ubiquitous computing, brilliant algorithms, and near-sentient fraud watchdog programs have combined to make this dream at last possible.

Only then we will have proved that the vast majority of people will not pay a dime for content on the web.

Reddit gold seems to fit here. It makes no sense to me but it seems to be working. I find it funny the threads complaining about Reddit's recent horrible hiring an mod decisions all had TONS of gold lol

Reddit gold makes tons of sense. People can pay money to amplify the opinions they want amplified. Reddit actually monetized internet arguing.

> Reddit actually monetized internet arguing.

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.

Does gold affect the ranking of a comment (i.e. where it is displayed on the page)? I guess I never really thought about it, but I assumed not.

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.

Yes, it does. I think most of the various silly awards they have nowadays don't do it, but at least the original Reddit Gold award before all that other stuff does elevate a post or comment.

Sorry I meant it makes no sense for redditers to buy gold for posts that they are specifically calling out Reddit for bad behavior

Sure it does. They want to amplify that opinion. They think that calling out Reddit is worth the negative of paying money to Reddit.

I would, particularly if the blurb was very honest (or very creative). I have no trouble throwing someone even a one-time $5 if the website is funny enough.

How often do you do this per month?

How many webpages do you read per month?

Now divide one by the other.

IMO this wouldn't be a bad thing. There would be a stronger market mechanism at play here. It could cut down on the amount of garbage internet we consume, while incentivizing producers to create higher-value content that people will pay for, and that won't be forgotten immediately like this Suez website.

Unfortunately you are in the extreme minority. I was watching a stream on youtube that has an optional patreon subscription and people were complaining that $0.99 per MONTH was too much because the stream was too quiet for a bit.

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?

IMO the pricing itself signals that the product isn't worth paying for. $0.99 per month? For what I'm sure includes hours of streaming? It's close enough to $0 that I don't even think about whether an additional buck is going to make a difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com