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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

When I was just an ignorant kid, I was fond of building stupid little website where I could put adsense ads (they used to approve almost everyone) and have a small pocket-money income. In the best month, I made around $300. I could never figure out how to get traffic and people like Marcus and Amit Agarwal used to be my heroes.

Although, people like us on HN, won't feel excited about making a little websites and earning through Adsense income; a good business / startup seems more worthwhile but sometimes, I do get tempted to enter that territory again seeing people making thousands of dollars a day with just re-hashed content and a little effort but I feel it won't be something to be proud of in the future.

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> Although, people like us on HN, won't feel excited about making a little websites and earning through Adsense income

I dunno, I'm pretty excited about that sort of effort-to-income ratio. That's the equivalent of never having to pay for groceries again.

The allure of that seems enticing, but I've found in practice that the effort to income ratio is not what it seems: it takes a lot of effort to even hit that $300/mo mark, and it's not "set it and forget it" - in most cases you have to keep working to keep viewership interested or keep ever changing Seo rankings healthy.

I ll give you one. You can republish email content from the fashion industry and affiliatize every outgoing link via Viglink or Skimlinks. Take your time to select expensive brands, do some basic SEOing, encourage social share, force visitors to give you their email addresss when they get on a deals page before clicking through. Twice a year you will have a brand send you a take down. It will take you some time to get some traffic but you will hit $300 per month eventually.

If you were willing to spend some time in curating the homepage then you could do even better.

Could you elaborate a bit ? what does "republish email content" mean ?

It means ignoring copyright on their content.

I have done this, and honestly I got only two emails from major brands. In fact I got half a dozen emails from smaller brands wanting to be featured on it. I got also a couple of brand monitoring company who would use the product. If you are interested just email me and I will share more information with you.

Edit: When I say I have done this, I mean for two years, almost three. I saw from my Clicky stream the companies that would visit the site, and they included several of the brands whose content I was republishing.

A different take on Milled, perhaps?

http://milled.com/

I had, still have, the same moral issue. I want to make money, I want to earn a 'passive' income from websites. I just don't want to do it by being a son-of-a-gun and making content scrapping crud. I saw the evil, in my opinion, and tried to do it 'right' but couldn't get traction.

You don't have to make content scrapping crud to make a buck. The alternative is to take time and build out a focused site with quality content you've come up with. There are tons of one-man-show blogs and sites out there that provide a quality experience and still make money off of ads/offers.

I started my website 8 years ago and made it my full-time job about 3 years ago doing exactly what you've said, though without having any plan of action from the beginning.

I've talked to a lot of bloggers in two specific niches and they almost all say the same thing. They started their site for fun / something to do / be helpful and soon enough started getting traffic and started making money. None have a tech background or anything like they - they just got a Wordpress site and theme and started writing.

I enjoyed building the same websites as a kid. However, gone are the days of easy adsense money and the unregulated acai berry crazed industry of affiliate marketing. Their exists a lot more competition in this space now.

The rules and tools of the game slightly changed but there are still plenty of opportunities up for grab.

http://www.wizzed.com is a website started by a kid (I think he's 16 now). Check out the Alexa and SimilarWeb rankings. I know, vanity metrics, still. Not that far behind ViralNova, that just sold for $100MM.

Now, if you would be proud running this kind of website is another topic.

He is for sure making 4-5 digits USD every month!

Interesting. Where did you hear about this site?

How does such a site generate money ?

If you click on an article, you will see many ads for the same type of content "25 Things You Won't Believe Came Out of a Dog".

> Although, people like us on HN, won't feel excited about making a little websites and earning through Adsense income

Speak for yourself - I run several content sites covering a variety of topics that I enjoy writing about and I love every second of it.

Also if you think it's actually little effort to make these sites successful, I've got a beach house in Idaho to sell you.

> Speak for yourself - I run several content sites covering a variety of topics that I enjoy writing about and I love every second of it.

I wasn't pointing at people who put an effort in making original content but there are lots of websites which just build upon memes, gifs, simple tips, and tutorials and do quite well with it.

I agree that there is that 'mesothelioma' part of the web but your commentary sounds like some unfounded elitism. "Simple tips and tutorials" - what exactly is bad about that? If people are visiting the website, reading and receiving value from the content, what's the issue?

Further - what's wrong with gifs and memes? There is a market for it people will go ahead and supply it. It's definitely not easy to do.

Exactly. A content that is consumed is worth the time and effort of the individual person consuming the content.

I don't fancy Buzzfeed top 10 lists much, but someone out there finds it valuable.

The way I see it is that you have a choice (if the opportunity knocks).

1) Create a product (that you don't like) that a mass audience likes. Reap the benefits, and then start something that you do like.

2) Create a product (your life's work) that an audience may like and see what happens.

There are more options than that of course, but I hope my idea does come across clear.

Thats in the same line as the pejorative comments on startup tech being essentially simple CRUD Webapps.

Can I have few links please if you dont mind :)

Finding a niche that wants to pay more for content is nothing to be ashamed of.

If you believe that agreements are only reached when there is mutual benefit you are benefitting your customers by rehashing the content.

It's like an encyclopedia there's nothing new in it, however, there is great value in having all that information in one place.

>If you believe that agreements are only reached when there is mutual benefit you are benefitting your customers by rehashing the content.

This seems like a strange thing to believe. Why couldn't someone agree to something that never benefits them?

s/only/in general/

And in that case... I'd like to trade you $1 million dollars, for $1 a year for the rest of your life.

> In the best month, I made around $300. I could never figure out how to get traffic

If you never got traffic - why did Google adsense pay you $300 in a month? I get ~600 visits per day and I barely get $0.10/day - usually ~$1 if someone clicks on an ad.

Things have changed. There is a lot more content out there competing for page views. I made $100 a year from adsense from a site with a few programming tutorials on it, although I forget the traffic numbers. It suddenly just dropped to nothing without any change in the number of visitors.

He didn't say he never got traffic; just that he never figured out how he was doing it (and by extension never figured out how to increase it).

Ad network traffic is really a last resort. In my experience, they tend to focus a lot on remarketing and not enough on testing related products/services. For a lot of sites with lower traffic volumes, you might find better CPM's by hand-picking affiliates. At large volumes, doing ad sales.

10cents per day sounds extraordinarily low for 600 visits per day. But it all depends on content and how rich your traffic is. US Traffic will pay better than developing nation traffic.

I mean that's a quick glance at Google Analytics - I don't know if Google has algorithms that filter out bots or other non-human traffic.

I have thought about dumping google adsense and trying something else.

So make something small and simple, but original, and market it a bit. I have a few small tools that get a few thousand visitors a month, which brings in enough revenue to buy me a few dinners.

I think the startup crowd tries to make every weekend project into something big. But it doesn't have to be - small, but original work, when targeted to niche audiences, is easy to monetize ethically by giving very targeted ads in which they have a legitimate interest.

I won't get rich with my work of this nature - but my tools pay for their own infrastructure, with small/tiny (3 digit!) profits, so they are in the black. It is more than many startups can claim.

It's great bragging rights to be able to say "My website made more money than *.com last year"

My friend does this with a shitty viral type site. He does well and works a load of hours. You would think it is just reposting crap, but it is 99% putting out fires.

What kind of fires?

Unfortunately gone are the days when you could slap some ads on a blog and make a couple hundred bucks. I recall Stackoverflow mentioning they dropped Adsense because the revenues are small, lot of online magazine type of websites are going out of business because ad revenue has shrunk. By large, a big market correction in this landscape.

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