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Comment by somebodysomeone | Hacker News Reader

I built an information website (not USA) that now pulls in roughly $8800 a month via adsense. To get to that figure takes about 500k user sessions/month (lots of long tail traffic). Runs on a single medium website instance in Azure, takes about an hour a day in maintenance and monitoring for malicious traffic like scraping that can be a problem for info sites (I've mostly automated this).

The initial time outlay was quite large, but it was always approached from the point of view of generating a lot traffic to get the payback.

Won't share the link as it's a competitive niche.

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> (not USA)

Is the content in English, or a foreign language? Do you get most of your "long tail" referrals from google.com or an international version?

I suspect there are a lot of wide open playing fields for content sites in foreign languages that simply replicate popular US based ones.

I am curious about how you chose the niche and which factors you think make it successful for you?

It was certainly an area that I was interested in and understood. Also, I made a conscious decision to choose something that would have interest for a very broad group of people, or that was owned by a lot of people.

>(I've mostly automated this).

Can you talk about this?

Also, how many ads and what formats/sizes work best for you?

Approached the traffic filtering from a number of directions - I log and background parse the incoming traffic to look for IPs and ranges that are generating excessive traffic, and get notified of issues. From there I can temporarily/perm block them if desired. I also have a script that can temporarily block all Tor exit nodes, as occasionally I get attempted spamming/scraping from there.

For automating scraping/spamming protection, I would consider something like CloudFlare Security though, my own tools are good enough for now, but I would still be vulnerable to a DDoS or a botnet scrape - it's enough to stop one-man scrapers but I'll need something beefier soon.

Ad formats that seem to work best: 728x90 by a long margin. I generally top and tail the content section with a leaderboard ad. I do serve different sizes for mobile etc, but the leaderboard works way better. I've also experimented with skyscrapers and boxes, which performed very poorly (skyscrapers especially).

That's fantastic income. Is any of that hour a day spent adding content?

Generally no. When I add info it tends to be in bulk (augmenting existing information pages), and then this will be done as a stand-alone project - the info tends to need lots of massaging and making intelligent to give it value.

Holy cow! I'm taking a guess; is it some sort of aggregator website?

Sort of. I took various information sets (some external, some my own), and spent a lot of time pivoting them, merging them etc so that they could be useful. You couldn't find the information as it is on the website elsewhere in the same form, but you could research and produce it yourself, albeit at a much slower pace and with a lot of insider knowledge required.

A very much known service comes to mind! - maybe its yours, maybe different, but has lot of similarities with yours :)

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