Ask HN: How profitable has News.YCombinator.com been for you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How profitable has News.YCombinator.com been for you?

5 pointsdiminium8 comments

So far, if you can somehow convert the time spent on news.ycombinator.com into dollars, how profitable has visiting and/or contributing to this site has been for you?

Examples: I got a hired from a $100k job posted here. I found a technology which saved me weeks of work and thousands of dollars. I though I would need to buy this $2k software but this site showed me a cheaper alternative.

Things like that.

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In the sense that I have become smarter and wiser from blog links and Ask/Show discussions, very valuable - in terms of $ I would est $10k in savings from not pursuing bad ideas (no market demand, etc).

As an aside, HNews is valuable in terms of time spent and money saved or earned. Whereas FB is a black hole and LinkedIn has some value, and twitter the most.

- Learned a lot about enterpreneurship, startups & hacking (would have otherwise taken me 3-4+ years)

- Started blogging because of HN

- Started and made money on MVPFor1k thanks to HN & it's members ($5-10k)

- Got some freelance work while I was in high-school

....

- Met a good friend a couple years ago on HN that later on became my first customer, and a powerful testimonial.

- Acquired some customers because of it ($10-20k value)

- Got into a seed incubator because of it ($20k+ value)

-$10,000 from the unproductivity.

This, although I'd adjust for a WAY higher dollar amount. I will acknowledge that there is value from things posted from time to time on HN. But overall, if I had to make a bet, this is more entertainment than value for a lot of readers here (outliers not withstanding).

same here

I got a couple of good sugestions for my project. Other than that its a social media to me. Why shoudl I try to value it in terms of money? I like ideas, talks about those ideas. Thats good enough for me.

Got a new job through one of the hiring threads. Got a compensation boost from previous job so HN has been thousands of dollars profitable for me.

It's been profitable in the sense it has kept my sanity in periods of boredom. Other than that, I haven't learned much, or found anything useful.

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