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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

I made a very small and simple scraper utility for a photo sharing website (it's one of those sites that doesn't let you download through the app or easily on the website, similar to Instagram). Grab the link, throw it in a box on my site, and it gives you the full-res image you can right click -> download.

It's doing pretty decent in traffic, ranking around number 4 in a fairly generic search for this utility, and gets about 1200-1400 invocations of the download functionality per day. I'd like to monetize it but I'm not really sure what I can do. I put some ads up from a small ad network that's slowly been building up a couple cents per day maybe (and Adsense isn't really interesting in my type of site -- I tried), but I'm not even really sure how valuable my traffic is anyway.

If someone has suggestions for a better way to monetize, I'd be willing to hear you out!

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Donation button in a visible but non-intrusive spot.

Share a little bit about yourself to humanize.

It will probably make you more than the ads.

That's worth a shot, I'll consider it. Thanks!

I had trouble getting AdSense "interested" also. Depending on what Adsense is telling you I'd have varying suggestions if ads were still the way you wanted to go.

The best ways I know to monetize something for consumers: ads, app stores, donation buttons.

I tried an iPhone app to monetize the time zone converter but in my case the ad performed better. I tried a donation button for a few weeks and it brought in more than I expected.

Thanks for the reply! The reasoning Adsense gave for rejecting me seemed kinda difficult to disprove for my site. Here's the exact rejection reason:

> Google-served ads on screens without publisher-content

> We do not allow Google-served ads on screens:

> * without content or with low value content,

> * that are under construction,

> * that are used for alerts, navigation or other behavioral purposes

I'm thinking I'd probably fall into the first category. From the research I did, it seems like they want actual unique content, like a blog or something. Though if you managed to get a single-purpose-serving site onto Adsense, it gives me hope maybe I could as well. I might look into it again. The donation button seems worth a shot too. Thanks!

Try the following:

1. Have at least 3 ideally 5 text-heavy pages on your site. 500 words minimum each. Tell your backstory, explain the advantages of your product, create an FAQ, ...

2. Make sure the site has a navigation bar somewhere with links to the basics that most sites have: an About page, maybe a short privacy policy, a contact page.

3. The site can't look broken or have "coming soon" anywhere. It helps if the site has been given a "fresh coat of paint" from a designer.

I don't know for sure, but the feeling I get is some human at Google has a scorecard and they go and check your site. Google won't reveal the actual scorecard because it'd become too easy to game, but the things above are what I've learned through the process.

Seems like sound advice. I'll definitely be trying it in the near future. Thanks a lot!

I too wanted to use adSense in order to drive traffic to my side project. I made a small calculator for estimating dosage in cannabis edibles, which gets a few clicks here and there (https://www.scientificedibles.com).

It turns out that adSense, will not touch any cannabis content with a 10ft pole so it pretty much ruled out getting any traffic via them. There were some more niche advertisers but for those you needed substantially more funds.

In the end, I found that SEO and content were a good alternative (and free!).

> I tried a donation button for a few weeks and it brought in more than I expected.

I figured I'd come back and update that I removed all the ads from the fairly sketchy-looking ad network I joined (which had accumulated something like $8 of unpaid payout over the past year or so) and added a donation section to my website, and just a couple days later I already got someone that tossed me $10.

Perhaps I underestimated the generosity of people! Thanks for the advice!

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