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Comment by jordanmorgan10 | Hacker News Reader

Re: Ads

For me, I had some of the mentioned ad networks for a bit. But, they were all not to my liking in terms of UI and added unwanted cruft.

I always wanted to run my own ads, but I thought “Hey, I don’t have enough traffic.”

I think people underestimate (as I did) that if you write about a niche, even if it’s a broad topic (for me, iOS) that you can do your own ads for a nice bit of money.

I make about $12,000 from running my own sponsorships annually, and moving them to monthly only slots has been a revelation. I started with weekly, twice monthly and monthly but man - it was quite a bit of work.

I’ve hit a very nice sweet spot where I now make money from doing something I love, it’s manageable and it pays for my family vacations, kid’s sports and travel teams and Christmas. It’s great.

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I made some money from ADs on my blog, but it was short-lived. I made ~$50.00 after a post of mine got to the HN frontpage, and spread virally on other social networks as the word got out to more people and some well-connected people amplified it even more on Twitter, Facebook, etc

After that, income was too low to do things like pay rent, go on vacation, etc It paid for the domain renewal and hosting, but that was it.

ADs were not why I blogged though. The income from ADs was a bonus but not the main focus. Of course you get people like black-hat SEO types doing content farms and gaming Google whose sole purpose is to drive impressions and get clicks on ADs.

Then there is your core visitors blocking ADs and browsing with JS disabled which further hampers income from ADs. Maybe they enjoy their privacy, and that's fine. I'm not certain the percentage of users who do that. I would guesstimate 20% are blocking, and that could increase over the years.

How do you run your own ads? Is there a tech stack for it or did you roll your own?

The ads are really “sponsorships” and are nothing more than an image tag, two sentences and a link the sponsor gives me.

What do you use for analytics? And what kind of analytics do you show your potential advertisers?

I'd like to start a blog but I don't want any analytics on my page. I'm wondering if just parsing the access logs is enough. Curious to know what advertisers look for in your case.

I like this idea of running your own ads, this means you circumvent ad blockers because you're loading the ad from the same domain and also you have full control over the ad deliverable and not allow JS, just image and links. Images can have malicious things in them too but maybe some pre-processing could help with that

> What do you use for analytics? And what kind of analytics do you show your potential advertisers?

I use Plausible, and I don’t do show them anything more analytics wise than what the Plausible dashboard shows (visits, territory, etc)

I’ve heard of people doing sponsorships without analytics, definitely possible. My blog has been around a long-ish time, so that’s helped. I’ve only started running sponsorships since 2022.

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