Ask HN: Is it possible to turn my side project into a viable business? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it possible to turn my side project into a viable business?

3 pointsantichaos6 comments

Hi fellow hackers,

Last week I released a weekend web project at http://www.dnufg.com/ to show that plenty of interesting domain names are still up for grabs at retail price. I've attracted quite a few visitors (mostly from Reddit), but the AdSense revenue has been minuscule so far. I wonder what other monetization channels I should explore. Any thoughts?

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I don't think adsense is the best option. For this industry, affiliate sales makes a better revenue model. For each interesting domain, give the user a chance to back-order/purchase the domains via a registrar of their choice. In each link embed your affiliate code. You can email me if you want any help in deep linking.

For my webapp http://www.domcop.com/ I use a two revenue stream business model. Users have to pay a recurring amount every month to avail the services and all the links to various domain auction sites bring in affiliate revenue as well.

Couple of comments to make the site better

1. Add a search option - search on domain name as well as the text between quotes for each domain

2. Maybe add some more metrics for each domains - whether the site has been banned by google, page rank and validity, data from wayback archive, metrics from companies like seomoz, majestic seo etc

3. When a user submits a domain, let them choose the category the domain belongs to. As a user I would love to go through all domains for a specific niche (eg. garderning, mobile phones etc)

Maybe you can add a subscription options for certain domain names?

Then your site could act as a domain name watcher (though I'm sure those exist). You could charge some small fee a year (or until the domain comes up for renewal at least) -- and let people specify some emails to be contacted at.

You could also add some general information gathering, and send a report after they pay on when the domain is likely to come up for renewal/when they might hear about it.

I really don't know how easy it would be to monetize it, but if the price was sufficiently low, I think people would be into the whole set-it-and-forget-it-ness of that... Assuming they were willing to wait for some hot domain name

First of all, I love the annotations that explain each domain's "awesomeness." Really makes it stand apart from other similar sites.

Now, if by "quite a few visitors" you mean in the thousands or tens of thousands, you could start a newsletter perhaps. With 10k+ subscribers who regularly read a newsletter, you can get decent ad or affiliate rates.

On the page, offer to email people a weekly digest of top names. Give them the choice to choose to receive lists of names that are "funny," "awesome," or both. Then send them automatic digests, with ads and referral codes. Just a thought. Best of luck!