Diskprices.com makes $5k/month with affiliate marketing
medium.com
medium.com
It's the backlinks that allow it to rank. Getting them requires a lot of knowledge & work, like publishing articles on Medium or receiving links on HN.
Unsurprisingly, it looks like the creator is an SEO-expert with years of experience and dozens of projects.
Mens sizes are literal measurements in inches, ostensibly. However when you look at the sizing chart on brand websites you realize they all have varying levels of vanity sizing - across brands, across fits within a brand, and across years within a fit.
Then you have all the confusing nomenclature for fits - skinny, slim, straight, classic, standard, relaxed, boot cut, baggy, flare, athletic, etc.. And then hybrid ones like "slim straight" or other nonsense. Finally, some brands offer different inseams/lenghts for a given waist, while others have fixed ones per waist size so you have to get them tailored after, etc.
The shopping experience for me in jeans is to trying multiple brands/fits/sizes every 5+ years, and then keep buying that exact model until it is no long available, then reset.
I try to find products I like and then buy a bunch of them (in case they stop making them, etc) and I wound up making a spreadsheet once after becoming frustrated with the inability to trust the same "model number" means the same thing there.
2024. Everything is slow. Search doesn't work. Ad infestation is even more invasive than the popup spawning days of old. Product quality is rock bottom. We have done ourselves in. But it's no wonder third party sites with basic functions are on the rise.
The issue with sites like this, I feel, is staying power. Even with some reasonable SEO awareness and legitimate presence on the corresponding technical forums, it still takes years to accumulate links (but perhaps mostly bookmarks) to your product discovery site. Including organic HN mentions - if that's the right audience. Same for any other old-style web site. And people want a quick buck. So that they get impatient and give up the entire thing, or they give up mentioning the site in the right places. Or so that they sell ads or product placement - which then kills the organic effort.
When it comes to Weird Niche Sites, the co-hosts really capture the weirdness of the web. Spencer reveals his ‘90s-looking website, Disk Prices[link to the site], which is essentially a list of hard drive prices and their different characteristics.
https://www.nichepursuits.com/apple-gets-36-of-google-ad-rev...
The use case (buying cheap disks) requires currently-accurate information, which naturally maps to this sort of service.
We only see the tip of the iceberg without really knowing what’s going on behind the scenes.
Some sort of marketing is always involved.
This site is popular because it's organic & good & a fine service, one without peer or equal. It asks nothing of the user, and helps them make good informed decisions effectively.
Imagining there's some secret agenda is all too popular in way too many areas in the world. Fear Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD) can have some basis, but letting it get in the way, letting it obstruct or out shadow simple good as it comes lets us miss out on understanding value and positivity, and with those basis undermined we (society) are screwed.
It’s way more fantastical to believe in some supreme meritocracy.
Off course a good chunk is based on talent but the “there’s no conspiracies” seem like libertarian propaganda to me after a life in business where politics, marketing, law and nepotism were the real lessons.
The world actually runs on conspiracies - that’s how the human social mind works.
However... What I've found is that it is not always 100% accurate and if you really want the cheapest TB/$ (and you can wait) you should be setting up alerts on slickdeals or another deal website.
As a data hoarder, I try to just wait for deals and not use this site.
There are only three vendors of hard disks: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. (HGST used to be a fourth, but they're now WD.) Anyone else is a shady refurbisher to be avoided.
Be careful not to confuse user experience with UI aesthetics and pages with padding.
I prefer to view websites like this as if my phone was a desktop, and I tend to hate it when that desire is fought by aggressive attempts to reflow everything into a “mobile” format with no way around it. So I think it’s better than many modern websites as far as usability goes.
I only type that when something literally makes me laugh out loud. Thank you, this comment made my morning.
Earlier it didn’t occur to me that the comment about having to turn their phone sideways might not be sarcasm.
I think everyone but me is wrong and that my phone in portrait mode should be able to show at least 100 characters. The comment im replying takes up about an inch of vertical space, and is spread over six lines, one of which is blank and one is a single word.
This is larger than I find ideal but about the same as an average paperback novel. That said I need to twiddle a setting in Android developer options to get even this small. Maybe people want to loom at their phone without their glasses on? maybe less text seems "cleaner"?
This is my hill and I'll gladly die on it.
Or are these kinda of purchases most likely being made during work hours sitting in front of a nice screen?
Even a kid targeted 100$ Amazon fire tablet held horizontally is 1200 pixels wide these days.
This gives you an overview: https://blisk.io/devices
Example: Stake.com. Somehow manages to show a ton of information without feeling slow or sluggish. Isn’t pretty but has basic respect for legibility and whitespace.
I find that the filtering on diskprices.com works way faster than the typical search filters on Newegg, Canada Computers, and pretty much every e-commerce site I've ever used.
Disk Prices is definitely respecting my user experience by being snappy and not wasting CPU cycles and network round trips.
People asking for disk prices probably have looser standards in terms of UX. That's why it works. Backlinks and an audience who actually doesn't care about UX that much. Doing the same stuff in the fashion industry may not work.
Perhaps the opposite is true. A site like this works because Amazon is poor at finding products, never mind for comparing prices. Even e-commerce sites that filter data in a similar manner (and typically do a better job since they have more complete product details), this site is both faster and makes product comparisons easier.
While it is probably possible to tweak to UX to make it better, I would suggest the success of this site is due to providing a better UX for its target audience.
For that kind of audience, the simple UX of that website is attractive enough.
This site has an outstanding UX for its audience and users. This audience cares about UX. They/ we are not shy to tell you that most current web site's user experience sucks. So it's not a question of "looser standards". On the contrary it's a question of paying attention to your users.
"Content" is not alway descriptions, reviews and the like. It can be aggregation, statistical and calculated.
I thought it was novel. It was basically a guided questionnaire that asked you about your needs and price point and then spit out a laptop recommendation at the end
Source: Me. I had a comparison tool for products with similar layout to this. They originally denied it citing 'lack of content'. Made a 2nd website with some blogs/reviews, it was approved. Re-used the code/api for the comparison tool and closed the other website. They haven't complained in 12 years.
> The following marketplaces have threatened or suspended our accounts and are unlikely to return to diskprices.com without clear policy changes from Amazon: amazon.jp, amazon.nl, amazon.it, amazon.sg.
I'm a huge fan of this type of well-done advanced filtering-faceting. Is there a standard/popular library/tool for this?
It's a shame the link to the parent organization on https://diskprices.com/faq.html is broken. I'd love to see more sites in this style.
Of course, as other posters have alluded to, setting up a site like this does not just involve creating the web page itself -- it also necessarily would involve SEO and backlinks, etc., etc.
Again, as other posters have alluded to.
But that being said -- this web page still ranks pretty high in my book for simplicity (and elegance from that simplicity), in a money-making website.
It could be argued, successfully, that any website these days, any website at all -- would need visitors -- and if those visitors aren't coming from social media and/or Google ads -- then getting visitors there would necessarily have to involve SEO and backlinks.
Unless of course, you have some other creative and/or good way to get visitors to your website...
So, an excellent example of what a simple website can do -- if, if and only if you can solve the problem of getting visitors to your website, by one or more ways...
They shut down shucks.top.
> He created a website that looks like it was made in HTML with total disrespect for the user experience [...]
As I try to read more of the post:
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Please tell me more about this "user experience" and "disrespect".
Makes me questioning all the blog posts I posted on Medium.
The website making $5k/month: https://diskprices.com/
“We want an associate site to be one that adds value to the customer by giving them insight on a subject or product they might not get easily.”
Listing all of the products available (Amazon and elsewhere) in one place (there are like 20 total ) so a shopper could compare features seemed liked it would suffice.
Perhaps I should reformat the website to be like Diskprices and try again.
Really not applicable for anyone else than this dude.