Ask HN: How to monetize a website that is making views? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to monetize a website that is making views?

I recently made an app that detects your baldness with ML from hair pictures. It is making quite a lot of views and I am thinking if I can earn some money with it (https://amibalding.co/).

I don't want to make a paywall or something annoying for the user. For the moment there is no monetization and the hosting is around $100 a month.

If it can make the $100 month back I would be really happy because I could still runs the website and show it to recruiter. It's my most successful project and I show it on my CV.

Thanks guys,

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If you really have a site with a lot of people who are visiting specifically because they're anxious about balding, balding treatments are one of the most stereotypically lucrative products. You should hold out for a hell of a lot more than 100 dollars and a resume piece. Prequalified anxious traffic is worth a huge amount and there are a lot of high margin anti balding products with money to throw around.

If I had to guess, OP doesn't want to shill snake oil, which is basically what any anti-balding treatment other than minoxidil or finesteride is

I'm sure they can strike a deal with the company behind Rogaine or something though, so it could be pretty lucrative after all.

> which is basically what any anti-balding treatment other than minoxidil or finesteride is

And hair plugs, though it's kind of a nuclear option

Or, nice hats?

- think about who your audience is

- based on that, think about what products your audience would like

- reach out to the companies behind those products, asking for a brand sponsorship or some other advertising channel, and include your traffic metrics, audience demographic, and ballpark price in the email

- reach out to at least 100 companies (should be possible in a 40 hour week, although preferably space out your outreaches so you can learn and optimize future outreach’s from the initial ones

- if you don’t get interest, try google ads.

Or…

Charge for a human to adjust and certify the ML findings. I can see people paying a couple bucks to have “a hair expert” (anyone) score their level of balding.

Edit: Raising the stakes a bit. I can see people paying $10-20 for a balding report by a human, using the ML model as the initial/draft report. People may like (or want to disprove) to ML results and I think some people would be willing to pay for that.

Then develop an app to track balding over time and charge $9/mo :)

Agreed about charging for the expert opinion. Charging for anything may do 10x better than ads.

Could even just add it as an option to see if anyone would buy it, even before actually finding an expert and just say “not available yet” when checkout button is clicked.

Thanks for the advices !

There's a clear call to action - if someone is balding, offer to direct them to an educational page that explains current treatments and their advantages / disadvantages, using affiliate links.

Could also partner with one of those new internet based services where they have someone briefly meet with a doctor then prescribe them finasteride.

Thanks for the advice !

Offer a certified Picard rating. The more bald one is, one gets a more % like Picard. You can sell these for a few bucks plus shipping.

Remember, baldness is evolution. You don't see apes on the internet do you?

I finally have a claim to being highly evolved.

Sell mugs with the user's picture on them, in a captain's uniform.

Ads are fine, but please try to use an ethical, privacy focused ad provider and please don't throw angry popups at people who are using ad blockers. I understand that my ad blocking is possibly reducing sites' revenue, but I can't stand the way the web looks without ad blocking on. It's cluttered, provides visual noise (especially for animated ads), and is extremely distracting.

With that being said, best wishes in your endeavors with this site!

What’s your favorite ethical ad provider?

I've never used any ad provider, so I don't have a personal recommendation. https://www.ethicalads.io/ seems to be what I'm thinking about, albeit only aimed at developers.

>If it can make the $100 month back I would be really happy because I could still runs the website and show it to recruiter. It's my most successful project and I show it on my CV.

Assuming you're a dev and not a "business person," you can still run it and show it to a recruiter even if you don't make money off it. I've shown websites and projects that don't make any money during interviews.

They’re saying that $100/mo out of pocket is unsustainable to keep it live. If they can at least offset the hosting cost they’ll leave it up and be able to show a recruiter. Otherwise they will have to only show pics and source code.

Good point for sure.

I just checked out your site. It's a pretty cool idea and now I'm convinced I'm losing my hair!

But back to your question.

While I don't know your traffic numbers, $100 in revenue is something you could easily achieve in a couple of months.

Affiliate marketing is one way to go - that is, emailing companies that work in the hairloss industry to see whether they'd want to pay you to advertise on your site. Obviously, you don't want to ruin the simplicity of your website with too many ads, but one could work.

You can choose who you affiliate with, and so you could just reach out to companies that you like, and think that folliclly challenged people would want to know about. That would be great - there's so many snake oil salesmen in the hairloss world, it's good to give some help to the more genuine out there.

The hard thing is that there are more good ideas than successful websites. It's a shame, but I guess creating and profiting represent different sides of the brain. There's probably blogs out there where people talk about this very issue - taking a great bit of software and making enough money from it to keep it going. Best of luck to you!

I think you'd really help yourself by adding an analytics platform to your site. These tools will tell you everything about your website visitors, and you can then use this information to decide where you'll be best able to make your $100 back a month. Visitor Analytics is a good 'un, and I'll share the link at the bottom here if you fancy it.

https://www.visitor-analytics.io/

Ok I'm monetizing websites from 2016 so I think I can answer this question.

I think for your website you sell some hair product. You can place your amazon affiliate link. Your motivation should not sell the product instead it should be people click on the link.

If customer buys anything under 24 hours, you will get commession.

you can add other features and sell the pro version.

> If customer buys anything under 24 hours, you will get commession.

Can you elaborate on this? Surely the affiliate program only applies to purchases of promoted items?

Most affiliate schemes (e.g. Amazon) will give you commission for any purchase. Your affiliate code will be valid for a certain amount of time after they click through on it.

I have to wonder about your AI method. Surely the way you comb or style your hair in the photos can influence the results? And if you’re going to push product aren’t you not really motivated to make your AI as accurate as possible?

And is balding really all about hairline anyway? Personally while my hairline has not seen any noticeable recession, I have noticed that the individual strands of my hair have gotten thinner with age, to the point that my hair is a bit more difficult to style and scalp is sometimes more visible in certain hard lighting. I have seen older men with hair in all the right places but their actual hairs are so thin you can see quite a bit of scalp, so basically balding. I wonder if I am on a path to end up like these men or if I’m simply seeing a normal maturing of my hair follicles. Probably not something the AI is trained for.

You are quite right, there is hairline receding and diffuse thinning (DUPA). I am working on incorporating diffuse thinning detection. Thanks for the feedback !

It said No Hotdog

Awesome project! I’m sure someone would be willing to buy this from you if the traffic is big enough. If you want to move on to other engineering projects this may be best path. If you’re interested in learning sales and marketing yourself I would look into affiliate marketing with hair loss product companies. Happy to chat more about this if you want help.

A potential complication is the source of your traffic. It can be global. What works for an American audience may not work for a _____ audience.

Sometimes it makes sense to have Amazon affiliate ads for countries where that's a thing, and maybe toss the rest to Adsense.

Big $$$$ in hair transplants, but ethical to vet your vendors.

The content is so light, if it even starts to take off, it should be inexpensive and worthwhile translating into other languages. Maybe do paid translations for more common languages. For others... there's always Google Translate. If you can translate it to target language and then back to English and it makes sense, it probably makes sense in the target language.

I'm sure you have other things on your mind based on the many helpful comments here, but I actually got an error when trying to click the "use my camera" button on your site:

Error checking camera permission: TypeError: 'camera' (value of 'name' member of PermissionDescriptor) is not a valid value for enumeration PermissionName. e Camera2.js:16 Babel 7 e Camera2.js:14 im Camera2.js:24 React 7 Camera2.js:21:16 Error accessing camera: DOMException: The object can not be found here. Camera2.js:40:18

In the browser, the site rendered a white screen under the header.

I'm on Firefox 116.0 on Pop!_OS (a debian) 22.04.

Thanks a lot for the error reporting, it helps me a lot !

If you are running a site around baldness, you could think that men are more likely to visit, so target advertisers around this. Perhaps provide reviews to relevant products - not just around hair, but also fitness, fashion, style.

Can you build a newsletter? You’ll need to consider various rules around data storage, but companies like mail chimp will be able to help.

Or simply include some Google Adsense and make money that way.

If you are getting visits, then you will be able to make money with advertising

Why not provide an image upload feature? People may be hesitant to share a camera view, but for whatever reason, feel okay uploading a photo.

I am working on that !

You can sell stuff in a legit way for people who are balding. No affiliate bullshit, instead you take orders and sell the products right there on your website. That's a legit and sustainable business for you.

The question is if it's "below your dignity" to deal with actual physical products and customers, because I've found that hackers usually have this weird hang-up.

I have explored this but selling hairloss products is quite hard because most of them needs a medical license to sell. Thanks for the idea !

I honestly think you should try reduce your cost (is the GPU so expensive?) And just keep it as it is.

Everything besides hair transplantation is snake oil and even promoting hair transplantation means supporting the notion that this is something someone needs to fix.

You really want to underline this notion by providing target ads?

But yes referral link to such doctors might be perfect.

If you don't want to do very much, you can try adsense. If nothing else you'll get a good sense of what the floor is.

Shop this thing to men’s product brands and look for a micro acquisition. Good little gimmick to have on HIMS or Rogaine.com

Make a well researched course on hair loss, then sell it via udemy.

Also I am balding and I hate it, I wish I could have kept my hair

For me, acceptance took until 27. I stood before a downlit mirror in a pub toilet and I had to confront the shine. I buzzed my skull the next day.

Lean into it. Buzz your skull. It's a good look for an adult and people find it sexy. Stop hiding; make the weed-topped youth behold your cranium.

This. Just clipper it all off.

Whether a bald head is still attractive depends on many factors. People lie about this all the time. If you are balding, you should consider finasteride and hair transplants. If it is too late for that, acceptance is all you have, but then please do not bullshit others into believing it is considered attractive, because generally it is not.

Eh. I can't say I've ever seen a person with an objectively ugly bald head. Since the cause is usually genetics, we aren't hardwired by society and culture to see baldness as a unattractive trait. It's common enough that if we thought of it as ugly, this very conversation would not even be possible.

A poorly kept head of fuzz, sure, make sure to shave it well, but nobody I know thinks that you're "uglier" because you are a man and have a fully shaved head.

I'm not saying a bald head is ugly, I'm saying baldness is generally not attractive, as opposed to neutral or unattractive. However, when given the choice, a bald head is very likely to be considered less attractive than a full head of hair.

> we aren't hardwired by society and culture to see baldness as a unattractive trait

At least historically, baldness rarely occured before "peak mating age", so it's not a trait that was strongly selected for. That said, it is a trait that is strongly selected for in today's dating market.

https://hypebeast.com/2021/4/tinder-data-study-man-with-with...

> A poorly kept head of fuzz, sure, make sure to shave it well, but nobody I know thinks that you're "uglier" because you are a man and have a fully shaved head.

Nobody you know will tell you this. Like I said, people will lie about this to keep the peace. Experimentally, outside of the social context, the impact of baldness is quite substantial:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7037739/

> Since the cause is usually genetics, we aren't hardwired by society and culture to see baldness as a unattractive trait. It's common enough that if we thought of it as ugly, this very conversation would not even be possible.

People with 'ugly faces' have that by genetics, and everyone judges them?

There are definitely some people who are less attractive when bald. It suits some people more than others. Especially people who had lovely flowing locks are going to suffer. For the average person with average hair though, I don't think it makes a huge difference.

I think we can all agree though, that lack of confidence (from hair loss) is far more damaging than the actual lack of hair.

> I think we can all agree though, that lack of confidence (from hair loss) is far more damaging than the actual lack of hair.

In what context? If we're talking about dating, I would disagree. First impressions are mostly visual, a bald head is far more likely to be rejected outright before "confidence" even has a chance to show itself. On the other hand, if you happen to be attractive despite a bald head, a lack of confidence may disqualify you down the line, but not outright.

i see ugly bald heads every day with weird shapes, they're out there in huge numbers. bald people also look bad if they have big ears, and it makes big noses look even bigger. it also almost always looks bad on fat people and people who can't grow beards, and looks exceptionally bad 100% of the time on people who fit into both of those categories.

I think full hair looks better but hey no one really cares how you look anyway.

Course? Take finasteride or shave it. Whatever you do don't cling onto it.

An alternative to Google Ads is EthicalAds: https://www.ethicalads.io/alternative-to-google-ads/ (by the folks who make Read the Docs)

Know of any similar alternatives to admob?

If you really have substantial traffic, I would do one of two things:

(1) Sell to a direct response marketer who can monetize this audience by selling hair treatments. OR,

(2) Learn how to sell hair treatments yourself on the site.

Affiliate link for rogaine and/or books about how to look good bald.

Thanks for the advices. For books or ebooks it's bullshit imo so I would not do it. But affiliate links for rogaine I will check.

Thank you for not considering ad spam. I know some people whose work I respect, who have the worst ads on their sites. I'm going to make time to ask them if they're getting paid well for those terrible ads, and if they're aware how bad it makes their sites look.

If you can identify some quality resources for people who are going bald, you might reach out to those people and see if they'll buy an ad spot from you. That's how it used to work, and with a high quality site that's getting views, that approach might work.

Thanks for the advice. It indeed might be the best to not be too intrusive while still making some money.

Maybe affiliate links to media with sexy bald people. Or grooming equipment suitable for balding heads (shaving kits, etc)

Thanks for the advices. Grooming equipment might be a good idea, I will check on that.

Maybe hair loss clinic ads?

Thanks. I will contact them to see if there is some affiliate available.

Sell it to one of the hair loss replacement type companies for a million.

What I don't get is why you need AI here. The link at the bottom to the scale makes it easy to verify by looking in the mirror, and that is less hassle than trying to gyrate my head into different positions to get the shoots done.

I think AI could do more here? For example - what would I look like with treatment X, Y, Z. And in general what are the treatments and tradedoffs. Last time I looked into it there is some kind of pill that only works for some men and if it works you have to keep taking it or it all falls out again. And there are implants. Obviously there are also wigs etc. And the cheapest option - a number 2 all over.

> What I don't get is why you need AI here.

Because many people are either in denial or overly anxious about it. Looking into a mirror isn't going to give you an objective judgement.

Visit the OP site and click “ What is the Norwood scale”. That is perfectly objective.

I am working on the software that would give the good hairloss treatment !

Nice idea! Could you comment about your tech stack?

Frontend: React.js + simple CSS. Backend: Python Flask

I made the models on google colab and once done I add them on the backend

Hope it helps :)

I am unable to access this website.

---

This site can’t be reached amibalding.co refused to connect.

Try:

Checking the connection Checking the proxy and the firewall ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED

Oops, the website looks up now. There must be something I don't see, thanks for reporting it !

Still no dice. :( As a follicly challenged male, I am squarely in your target audience, too.

What is the hit rate for your app?

It feels like if someone is asking the question, the answer is probably yes.

I have never had any indication to think that I am balding until I used this app.

I want to say it is broken. =)

Perhaps some more model work too! I'm about a 5 and it called me 1.8

Nice idea and implementation, though!

it says i'm "strongly balding" (6.2)... i don't think so, like at all? does it pick up some kinds of signals I wouldn't be aware of? or is it simply about my haircut or head being weird?

there are a ton of new companies who sell finasteride and minoxidil sponsoring basically every video on youtube, reach out to them and see who will pay you most for advertising

Have a google maps to the closest suicide booth, futurama style

I'll buy your site for $1,000.

Immoral, but profitable:

- Put ads on the site

- Force people to give you their email to see results, then sell the mailing list

- Collect as much information about the user as you can, compile it with the photos of them that they've given you, and sell it

- Add amazon affiliate links to anti-balding products (least immoral of the lot)

Not immoral, but won't make you much money:

- Paywall

- Beg for donations

Thanks for the list. Affiliate links for anti balding products is ok imo, my moral sense allows me to do it at least haha.

I contribute to open source and by experience begging for donations does not work much unfortunately.

Rest assured, if you make money from it, someone will accuse you of immorality.

"Good people" are supposed to give it all away for free and then feel bad about being "lazy" when they can't pay their own bills. ;)

Good people sell good products without telling someone they look like crap.

>- Put ads on the site

I don't think this is immoral. Ads are a perfectly legitimate business model.

This feels like a situation where the ads could be highly targeted. Highly relevant ads can be pretty helpful.

It gives a bad incentive to the operator to exaggerate baldness risk. "Early stages of balding buy this hair product!" Probably sells more product than "you're perfectly fine, congrats".

I agree it's not unethical to honestly sell ads though.

Affiliate links for fancy hair care products if it doesn't come up balding?

Yea I mostly agree. I am thinking about adding affiliate links.

Affiliate links are fine too as long as they're disclosed as such.

Curious on how is it making the views?

Try being more aggressive with your marketing-- don't wait for people to go to your site, go herd them there yourself.

Use your tool to scan high-profile Instagram photos and for anyone with >n degree of baldness, market hair restoration products to them. I recommend the indirect approach: subtly comment on peoples' photos with stuff like "oh man, I remember when my hair started thinning..." Don't do this to people's wedding and engagement photos unless you're trying to be Evil.

Don't even suggest they are balding, just remind them that baldness happens to people of their age and let their own vanity and insecurity do the rest. Followers will see that as well and since so many fashion themselves after influencers, you'll appeal to their insecurities too. Engage a sibling comment or two for legitimacy and then steer people to your site to check for themselves. Then you recommend hair growth solutions.

You technically could just spam every account like this, but targeting accounts where baldness is an actual threat will keep the scheme covert for longer. Attempting this on anybody with a full set of luxurious locks will blow your cover.

You could also sell your own product. Private label some Latisse sourced from India or something. That stuff is marketed for eyelash growth but would probably make hair grow on a piece of sheet metal. The retail US price is exorbitant.

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