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Comment by vlucas | Hacker News Reader

I created http://jscompress.com/ several years ago as a simple online JavaScript compression tool that can also combine multiple files into a single output (and guarantees they will be compressed in the order input).

It's been making around $200-300 per month for several years, and this year has jumped up to $300-500 per month. This is only from Google Adsense: http://cl.ly/WobJ - I also always get a nice holiday spike in traffic and revenues, even though there is nothing seasonal about compressing some JavaScript.

It's zero maintenance, and sometimes I even forget about it. I spend maybe 1-2 hours updating the website to a new Uglify.js version per year. It's a simple single file node.js app hosted for free on Heroku.

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That's great! Did you do any advertising to get it going? How long has it been around?

Zero advertising. All I did was link it from my blog and a few other websites I own and tweet about it a few times. I imagine the strength of the domain name and the keywords on the page help a lot. It's also been linked as a useful tool on many highly trafficked and well respected blogs, so it's got some very good credible link juice going for it.

Honestly I just created it for myself back before Grunt, Gulp, etc. after searching for some simple online tools and not finding any that allowed uploading and combining multiple files together. The first version was PHP, and I switched it to a node.js app in 2011 after Uglify.js came out (there were a lot of problems with the PHP library I was using).

I created the website in 2008, so it's been going for quite a while, collecting backlinks and traffic ever since. I am not looking at the reports right now, but I believe it made less than $200 the whole first year I had ads on it (it didn't always have ads).

How does it make money? I turned off my adblocker and still don't see ads.

Do you have Ghostery or something else turned on? There are definitely ads on the page :).

Do you advertise or do you get customers organically?

No advertising - 100% organic. The strength of the domain name and the keywords on the page help, and it's also been linked as a useful tool on many highly trafficked and well respected blogs, so it's got some very good credible backlinks, and is quite popular.

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