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Comment by miloszf | Hacker News Reader

I have no revenue, but around 12-20k unique visits a month consistently for the past 9 months. The site is http://androidwallpape.rs and main sources of traffic so far have been android blogs and podcasts as well as stumble-upon sites. Initially the link was posted to reddit and it was picked up from there. Of those visits around 40% is new unique visitors, each month.

I would say engaging with communities that might be interested is the most effective way to get good traffic (& feedback) in a lot of sectors.

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Very cool, great execution for a wallpaper site. Few suggestions...

1. Filter by color. Allow users to pick a color on a palette, and select all the images with that primary color.

2. Categories. A simple dropdown in the navigation to select nature, architecture, water, abstract, etc.

Lastly, why don't you branch this concept out into other areas? This would be a beautiful showcase for general photography. Allow users to upload their work, 'like' photos, and display the best on the homepage. Mix in profiles, and the ability to comment on images you select, and it would be an interesting site. Somewhat of a behance, pinterest, logopond mix geared towards photographers.

Thanks, glad you like it.

Site was put together on a weekend (runs on KirbyCMS + some custom PHP for likes), so any serious add-ons will likely require a re-build.

I can see both being useful though, now that it has ~120 images. I started out with 25, so I really didn't feel like I needed it at the time.

As for the idea, I definitely agree. In my head, it's the design and lack of compromise that make the concept work, so that'd likely carry across well to a different area. Photographers however have 500px (http://500px.com/popular) which I wouldn't set out to beat with a side project :)

Awesome site! You could easily monetize with just placing even a single AdSense ad on the site. An app might also be useful in monetizing. Is this a custom site? Curious what you used to make it.

Thanks, glad you like it!

It's made using Kirby CMS and a custom PHP script for counting the likes (horrible code). The overlay offset effect (visible only on desktop) I've wrapped in a plugin and put on github here: https://github.com/miloszfalinski/jOffset

I know it sort of goes against reason, but I'm tired of sites riddled with ads, so was hesitant in making any sort of move. Only option I'd be considering was approaching good android developers myself in hope for some ad based sponsorship. That way quality wouldn't suffer, I'd get something out of it, and users could find out about actually good apps. Then again, monetizing was never a goal, and I'm slowly running out of nice things to add, so I'll probably keep it as it is.

By monetize you mean make $100 or so a month right ?

With RPM's around a few dollars for AdSense isn't that the most he would be looking at in revenue, or am I missing something ?

Pretty much. Buddy of mine runs one of the most popular wallpaper sites and the ads make pennies on the dollar. You can't really monetize a wallpaper site at all (especially if you aren't the one making the wallpapers).

Do you have any plans to monetize the site or is it just something fun for you to do? If the former, have you given any serious thought as to how?

As per my other comment, I've considered it, but haven't gone thought with it. My only motivation for the site was to repurpose what I had laying around on my hard drive in hopes it would be useful to people. Also, I wasn't willing to do anything that would sacrifice experience or quality, so I decided not to. Only thing that I think could work would be approaching android devs directly about ad based sponsorship, because that would allow me to control the relevance and quality of the ads. Decided against it as, honestly, I'm busy with other things and the hassle outweighs any potential revenue I could hope to get out of it.

You might consider running ads, or providing a simple Android app for random/popular/rotating wallpapers.

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