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Comment by toumhi | Hacker News Reader

I didn't post on the last threads I think, but I have had some modest success with passive income, was making up to 700 euros a month 2 years ago, this is down to 130 euros a month now. Still not too bad considering I haven't really touched the site for almost 2 years. But my heart isn't in that kind of projects anymore. Passive income is a bit overrated in my experience.

Still nice to get a small check at the end of the month.

The site in question is http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com, it provides printable gift certificate templates.

EDIT: I should add the money comes in from Adsense. I tried other monetization schemes as described there http://www.sparklewise.com/my-first-passive-income-project-o...

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After reading your post last year, i started my own niche website making iphone app templates (easily googleable). I ended up taking it to roughly $3k/month in revenue and have just sold it to a private company.

Thank you for writing that post.

Nice site. Has the income come down due to a reduction in traffic spend or just a loss in rankings due to reduction in freshness metric wrt SEO or any other reason?

He mentioned it's probably seasonal. All the traffic he gets during non-events are people who have friends with a birthday soon.

My site got slapped by Google Penguin update, lost 90% of its traffic and never really recovered. It's going down steadily now for some time.

As for the Google penguin update drop in rankings, it might have been a stale content penalty, or a devaluation of spammy links - I wrote manually lots of articles for supposedly respectable article directories pointing back to the template website to go up in search engine rankings and it worked well for some time.

The idea was to extract myself of this process at some point since it was painful to write not very interesting articles. But didn't get around doing it, or outsourcing it.

My site got slapped by Google Penguin update, lost 90% of its traffic and never really recovered.

It's funny how you don't really build websites anymore (did we ever?), you build sites for Google's search engine.

Even thought websites are conceptually different from writing a Photoshop plugin, in reality? Not so much. You're just as dependent on Google as you are Adobe, it's just hidden.

Would you consider passing it on to someone else, with a view to getting hands off royalties for a time. Or would you just want to sell it and have it clear cut?

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