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Comment by thibaut_barrere | Hacker News Reader

http://www.hackerbooks.com is a direct financial failure.

The income does not cover the hosting as is! Early on I expected it would be a small earner (maybe $50/mo) but we're not there even.

On the other hand, it had a fairly positive impact on the consulting/learning side of things (ETL, data processing etc).

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Based on your stats & the size of your dataset, I'm guessing you could easily host this at AppFog on their free tier: http://appfog.com/products/appfog/pricing/

For now I'm happy to leave it where it is and keep my focus on shipping/growing my SaaS product (https://www.wisecashhq.com).

But thanks for the note that said! I have that migration marked in my TODO list :)

I use and appreciate your site. I've been meaning to pick up some of those books next time I get cash to buy books.

Thank you!

I think Your site has great value. Just keep it up and do marketing.

Thanks! The thing is that it got plenty of coverage but nonetheless it brings very few in commissions.

I'm currently focused on a SaaS product (profile for info), but who knows, maybe I'll get back to it a bit.

Wondering what is the "conversion" rate? Around how many unique visitors do you get monthly? Your site looks good and something seems off if the coverage is good...

I collected a few stats here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvUEclt_oCPedHV...

The typical conversion rate (after removing SU visits which are basically bouncers) is at 0.43%.

The earnings is around $5 for 1000 pageviews (without SU) or $3 (with SU included).

Any thoughts on improving this?

Make it a tweetmeme.com for Amazon items. Can you also pick out ebay items?

Picking ebay items could be a bit of work.

But the tweetmeme idea is good, I'll keep that in mind, thanks!

Right on. Check out this too http://www.computer-book-authors.org/junglescan.htm

http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/Amazon_Sales_R...

http://web.archive.org/web/20030729051353/http://www.jungles...

(also scanning (sub)reddit)

That's a fantastic site. Bookmarked!

Thank you! People seem to really like it (I got plenty of emails etc).

Wonderful site!

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