Ask HN: How does your site income break down? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does your site income break down?

26 pointsvaksel32 comments

Percentage wise, I'm looking for something like this:

  premium subscriptions - 15%
  adsense - 20%
  adbrite - 10% 
  t-shirts - 11%
  direct sales advertising - 5% 
  eBay affiliate program  - 3%
  Amazon affiliate program - 1%
  CJ affiliate programs - 1%

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100%: Selling things to people for money.

Are the people upvoting this also selling directly to end users? Or just upvoting to agree that it is a good revenue model :/

Both: I am licensing to companies myself, and yeah, it's also a damn good revenue model.

Heretic!

A few different sites w/ diff models:

  Consumer facing listings site
  90% advertising (prem ad partners + adsense)
  10% affiliate

  Consumer facing subscription
  98% subscriptions
  1% advertising
  1% affiliate

  Consumer facing pay per use
  100% customer payments

Just curious: on the second one, serving ads doesn't bring in much income, and it might even drive people away. Have you considered removing them? If so, what was the result?

The percentage is so low because it's not shown on much of the site. Paying subscribers don't ever see ads. It only shows for the free account and for some long tail SEO pages we have. We probably should remove them and just put up-sell copy there though...

100% Adsense: $1.50 Adsense revenue from 10,000 unique visitors so far.

AdSense is such a rude awakening.

90% subscriptions (monthly renewals, $19.95)

10% advertising (adsense)

The sample you provide leaves a rather large hole to be explained.

oh those aren't real numbers, I just gave examples of some options, since I want it a little bit more detailed than "advertising"

Ok, so, since you're asking us, what are your numbers ?

august:

adsense - 37%

tribal fusion - 26%

direct ad sales - 17%

CJ affiliate ads - 16%

donations - 4%

Thank you!

Interesting the 'donations' column. And tribal fusion looks like a pretty serious contender for adsense wrt to income.

That's a nice datapoint to have.

If you want to trade 'absolutes' drop me a line.

Tribal fusion is good if you have a lot of page views but few clicks(they just do CPM ads, but are pretty much top dog in the space, so they can get better rates), but you need a lot of traffic to get in.

You need about 5K uniques per day to get in, although that number varies by category...for example I hear that if you have a game website, you'll need 20K uniques per day to get in.

I just needed CPM since I get a lot of page views per user, average is only ~6 pages, but that number is distorted by all the one page wonders from when the site hits some social network. The actual users who come to the site from niche specific sources, do about 20 pages per hit.

Lots of pageviews/uniques is not my problem, getting enough people to click the ads is. Adsense scores horrible on one site we run because of that.

I will definitely sign up and let you know how it worked out.

VC :)

This is actually the most scary comment I've seen here in a while. VC is not income.

well, it had a smiley at the end...

Income breakdown:

100% projectwonderful. Advertising space.

However, my site is not a web application or anything. It is just an encyclopedia on purely all things open source gaming, and the only one in the universe. As a result, I doubt there are many ways to monentize the traffic.

It gave me nice money to booststrap my game development site, although I still need to make it "real serious as in not-just-for-fun" startup firm.

What's the url of your site?

Since you asked, http://libregamewiki.org

1. Sponsorships

2. Direct advertising

3. Adsense

1 + 2 are sometimes blurred

2 + 3 are sometimes reversed

...as the other guy said your own numbers don't add up. And furthermore they are out of order.

...and we try not to just break even

We're the platform provider in a two-sided genealogy market (genealogy document clients on one side, genealogy lookup providers on the other.) We take a commission from providers (15% of their selling price) and a processing charge from clients (10% of the provider's selling price.)

So our income breaks down as:

client processing charge: 40%

provider commission: 60%

Ours breaks down something like this:

One-time fees: 30% Subscriptions: 60% Transaction fees: 8% Service/consulting: 2%

100% no income, I run my site because I love to (no linky).

100% from donations, 0% from AdSense. Donations facilitated by http://pledgie.com/ .

100% premium subscriptions (monthly)

100% Monthly subscriptions.

premium subscriptions - 99.9999% Adsense - 0.0001%

(Sorry, just had to say it out - Adsense just hasn't worked for me)

Adsense: 99% Donations: 1%

adsense: 90%+

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