Hacker News Reader

Comment by BryanBigs | Hacker News Reader

$1000/month from adsense on my free background picture (no attribution required, use it for whatever you want) website. Kinda looks like crap, but I'm afraid to touch it because it's such a steady-eddy producer. I add a picture every month or two, and get <10% of my traffic from direct search. Has so many links from Uni's and articles on where to find free stock photos that traffic just rolls on it.

View on HN

Respect for those stats! When did you start the project and what was the start of the site all about (any marketing hacks? :) How did you manage to get those links? Did you approach those websites actively when you started the project? Can you share some traffic stats or CTR?

You make 1000 a month from this site? I'm very impressed. I feel like I should be doing something with the gigs of photos I have sitting on my computer now...

I wouldn't try to sell them - there's a lot of supply in that market right now. But people will always visit free once they know about it - it's then your job to figure out how to monetize them while keeping the nuisance factor for the user to a minimum.

That said, my site seems to get picked up in an unhealthy number of "top free images for your website" type list articles - I'm not sure if other sites would get picked up at the same rate, but you could always try.

What laws surround whether you can post a particular photo? For example, photos of cityscapes, businesses or store fronts, landmarks, or photos with random other people in them?

Can you share url?

sure - http://freemediagoo.com

By end of august I'll be split-testing moderenizing it (it's not mobile/tablet friendly, backend makes it a pain to add content (especially text),etc) - I'm hoping making it nicer doesn't hit the income.

How did you decide on the placement of adds and layout of site? Glad it's doing well for you.

Testing about a year ago. Had a 8x increase in CTR without much drop in CPC, so that was a big win for the site. I think there's more to squeeze out but it was written a long time ago in hobbled-together .asp, and that's not my forte. Someday I'll move it to a different back-end so I can experiment with things with more ease. For instance, I have content (with real words!) ready to go, but sadly the amount of work I'd need to do to hack the code to display it isn't worth it if I plan on changing the code out anytime soon.

Where do you get the photos from?

I take some myself, and have a whole bunch in backlog from when I bought it. I've bought one from an artist I knew and liked.

Now that my kids are old enough to travel easily, I plan on taking picture-taking vacations to some cool places once a year - and let them take a shot at learning photography on the job.

Nicely done! $1K on revenue for that? Are you driving traffic toward that? I do photography and feel like stock images could be a nice way of getting traffic, but don't know how to optimize AdSense.

I haven't driven any traffic yet. I have a SEO tool that I've been developing and finally finished, and was going to use this site as my test case. With no text it has no search engine traffic, the picture names are horrible from an seo perspective...there's a lot I can do if I ever have time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com