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Comment by rufugee | Hacker News Reader

Quickmeme was now netting the brothers around $1.6 million a month

So...say I have an idea which would allow me to drive a lot of traffic to my site from Reddit. How does one begin to monetize this traffic? Where do you start? Where do you go to find advertisers? I've always had a vague understanding how it worked, but if I really had an idea with lots of traffic generation today, I lack the real world understanding re: how to turn that traffic into dollars now.

Also, /r/AdviceAnimals all seem to link directly to images...so where would the page views for quickmeme come from? Were they generating $1.6M simply by showing ads to the meme creators?

View on HN

The $1.6 million a month estimate is completely made up. They just used some web service that tries to estimate, based on pageviews. Not based on any actual knowledge. (That said, they probably did well - but not that well.)

According to the same site, HN makes $1.4 million a year.

Quickmeme used the infamous transparent JPG trick to prevent direct linking of images, forcing links on /r/AdviceAnimals to link to the page with ads.

Can you explain how this works or provide a link to an explanation? Thanks.

A little discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5928510

So this means that there are a significant number of people "skilled" enough to right-click, but not skilled enough to view source. The mind boggles...

The latest variations of this put the transparent JPG in the source code, then load in the image via JS with a lower Z layer. Now you move from "View Source", to "Developer Extension, watch assets, copy initial URL, paste, save".

Nope, just Select All → View Source, which shows the current DOM state, at least on Firefox.

Well today I learned something new!

Used to weird me out that Chrome performs a new GET request for page source but I guess I'm used to it now.

select text an address bar, ctrl-c

click somewhere else ctrl-v

and yes, view-source is beyond most people

How is that at all surprising? Right click is a really common thing for most non-Mac users. View source is something most people have only used by accident.

when was the last time you used a mac? right click has been omnipresent for the past half decade.

I use a Mac every day. I also watch other people use Macs and not only do they not use a contextual menu, but they by and large don't use keyboard shortcuts either. HN users are a pretty small subset of computer users.

Yeah, that was annoying to deal with when I posted because I would have to use Chrome's Dev tools to extract the image Url. For the average user, this wasn't so helpful if they didn't want ads.

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