Ask HN: My site's popular. How would YOU monetise it?

by TimH • 17 years ago

39 47 17 years ago

Hey guys, the server bill's getting pretty big now. I'd like to start setting up some paid accounts pretty soon. Apart from crawling people more often, can you see any creative ways to give extra benefits to paid members? Any suggestions appreciated. :-)

TimH7• 17 years ago

larryfreeman2• 17 years ago

You might want to check out the story behind HotOrNot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_or_Not

They were in a similar situation and according to Wikipedia, they sold in 2008 for a rumored $20 million. They started in 2000 and I believe they made a deal with their internet service to reduce cost.

matt1• 17 years ago

Founders at Work details HotOrNot's launch. If I remember correctly, they worked out a deal with Rackspace where Rackspace would provide hosting and HotOrNot would promote the fledgling hosting company whenever they could.

naz• 17 years ago

Adsense would be a good place to start

josefresco2• 17 years ago

Agreed. It's boring but starts you along the path to eventually selling your own ads. I'd also recommend highly targeted affiliate programs, which can pay better than AdSense and give you more control over who/what is shown.

larryfreeman2• 17 years ago

I would say register with a site like Quantcast.com so you can publicly quantify popularity of your site. This gives bloggers and businesses easy access to your numbers. People like to talk with popular sites.

You might want to check out Chris Anderson's book on Free: the Future of a Radical Price as a good source for brainstorming business models.

vulpes• 17 years ago

I don't think you'd be able to get people to pay for premium features...what would they be anyways? I do have 1 idea: Sponsored tweet placement. Companies are probably willing to pay extra money for certain tweets to get special placement.

Besides that you should get retweets/replies working, i wanted to RT a few things and got put off by the coming soon box.

gojomo• 17 years ago

Indeed -- something a little like StumbleUpon's model, where a declared percentage of displayed items are actually paid placement, could work.

Payment could even be in the form of "virtual favorite points" -- ranked score is real favorites + bought favorites, though with some cap to prevent the list from becoming all paid.

(OTOH, 'favoriting' isn't hard to fake, is it? So as soon as being atop your list is economically valuable, it may become dominated by spam.)

nbhat• 17 years ago

Sponsored tweets are a good idea. But results are best when companies get to target the audience based on their interest. For example, a company would more likely to spend to show ads on specific search term than all the search term. So if you can find a way to categorize the people visiting your site based on retweets or fav patterns and have separate categories of favs then you can have targeted sponsored tweets.

bravura• 17 years ago

Sponsored tweets sounds good to me too.

mahmud2• 17 years ago

Virtual goods. Go super edgy, forget flowers.gif and hugs.png: vices sell, introduce liquor, hookers and hard drugs. Maybe even go deep on the cultural references, even be a little harsh and xenophobic. Virtual gifts have a general positive connotation because they're usually given to friends, on facebook and other closed social networks. Twittering is a place for adversaries, a perfect play ground for irony and everything anti.

As a super premium: allow people to upload their own text and graphics for a dollar, and attach that to the tweet.

  @squarejaw bought *victim* a pair of nads

  @ironical sends you a touching violin solo on a miniature DVD

  @citygirl sends you another pair of pink polo shirts to wear over all your others

etc.

TimH7• 17 years ago

Interesting idea. Would anyone here actually pay for virtual goods? Examples? I can't say I ever have on facebook apps etc..

mahmud2• 17 years ago

you as an individual are too much of a small sample size for the recognition of any pattern; and a self-selected sample of your peers is too biased. That's why God created market studies and published research. Hint, 12% of Americans bought Virtual goods online. Worth 1.8 billion.

http://gigaom.com/2009/07/30/12-of-americans-bought-virtual-...

patio11• 17 years ago

I own about $20,000 of notional fractional interest in an absolutely ginormous pool of paper slips with numbers on them. Except, there isn't actually any paper anymore, since they made it all electronic. But if there were slips of paper, they would number in the billions, each saying that I own fractional interest in the real property and future earnings of a particular person. No person named on any of the non-existent pieces of paper actually exists -- that is the point of having the paper in the first place. Or not having it, as the case may be.

I have also paid for software, music, videos, text messaging, online connectivity, phone time, concerts, priority boarding, and World of Warcraft.

But I wouldn't ever pay money for virtual goods, oh no, that stuff just isn't real.

(Moral of the story: it is all how you sell it.)

caffeine• 17 years ago

Virtual goods paid my rent in Tokyo for a year. I wouldn't buy them, you wouldn't buy them, but ... some people buy them. Enough people.

Raphael• 17 years ago

This would of course rely on people not realizing they could just use any image host.

thunk• 17 years ago

Bwahahaha. Your jib: I like the cut of it.

"Are you joking?"

"I don't even know anymore."

jbr3• 17 years ago

Maybe deck network (http://decknetwork.net/) or fusion ads (http://fusionads.net/)?

trafficlight2• 17 years ago

The Deck is by invitation only.

pierattt• 17 years ago

They're both by invitation only.

jbr3• 17 years ago

Checked it out; Deck is invite only but has contact info "for more information" -- it's exclusive, but that doesn't mean you can't poke them to see if you can get in. They probably have pretty strict design and traffic requirements, though, since they're high-end.

unohoo• 17 years ago

I really didnt see why some of the tweets were being favorited. Based on their content, i'd agree with vulpes above - it'd be pretty difficult to get ppl to pay $$. Sponsored placement sounds like a good idea.

Another suggestion, although not monetization related - provide a widget of say the top favorited / top favorited users - that bloggers could embed on their blog - increases distribution.

sobriquet• 17 years ago

nice work, it's fun to get some of the best stuff out there that doesn't seem to be made up like tfln or fml

1) Add tipjoy functionality, encouraging users to tip the best/funniest/helpful tweets.

2) charge referral fee to users who you scrape. Each new follower they get from favstar.fm costs $0.10 (seems like many of the people you are featuring are self-employed or creative types who would probably like more followers)

3) sponsored favoriters... allow brands/users who want their profile pic to show up as if they had favorited a tweet. pay per impression or click basis (they could get creative with the profile pics to grab attention)

4) promotion of top favorites across the web. build plug and play modules that people can add to their own sites, my yahoo, igoogle, their facebook page, etc. (or maybe just an RSS feed). Anyone can post it to their own site for entertainment value, but the only tweets that are eligible for the module are ones from paid accounts. Trouble is, the best/funniest twitter users probably wont want to pay for that distribution, they don't need it.

drusenko• 17 years ago

What's your definition of popular? I can't find any stats on your site that show any reasonable levels of traffic that would allow it to be either ad or freemium supported.

dustyreagan• 17 years ago

Might I suggest http://FeaturedUsers.com? It's a Twitter application ad network for users who want to promote their Twitter account. It integrates into your site w/ 1 line of Javascript. Full disclosure, it's my project. :)

TimH7• 17 years ago

Hey Dusty, I had a look at your site a few days ago and followed you on twitter. I was interested until I had a look at a few of the people advertising themselves. The ones I saw looked pretty boring. ;-) I would be interested in talking to you more about it though. tmhaines at googles mail system.

pxlpshr• 17 years ago

I know a few people using Dusty's service, for most it covered the hosting bills and has much better returns than Google AdSense. He's putting a lot of energy into making it even better.

I suggest diversifying your ad real estate, at least initially, there's no reason you can't have Featured Users + Adsense + Deck, etc. Just don't go overboard with the # of ads on the screen, you'll drive people away.

You may also try using Google AdManager or OpenX and selling ads yourself. I prefer the former because Google handles the hosting.

grass123• 17 years ago

I found a small problem on your site (for me at least). For reference, I am running Firefox 3.5 on Gentoo.

On a page like this, http://favstar.fm/users/asshuku, the Japanese kanji is being rendered like Chinese kanji. It's still readable, but it's just a little off-putting. I'm not native Japanese (I can read it, though), but the best example I can give of what this feels like for a Japanese person is that all of the text on the page has been highlighted and underlined. Readable, but annoying.

I was playing around with it in Firebug, and it looks like a simple(?) fix would be to change the line: <html lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml xml:lang="en"> to: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml xml:lang="en"> or: <html lang="ja" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml xml:lang="ja">

You might also be interested in seeing Google's solution (http://www.google.com/search?q=google.co.jp), Slashdot's solution (http://www.slashdot.jp/), or Wikipedia's solution (http://www.wikipedia.ja/).

TimH7• 17 years ago

Thank you. Will fix.

gchucky• 17 years ago

Um, you sure about that? I just looked at it and it seems just fine. Firefox is rendering it as UTF8. I'm running FF 3.5 on Windows. (I'm not Japanese, but I can read the language.)

niyazpk• 17 years ago

I would love to suggest a good business model, but I am afraid I will have to tell you that even twitter is not able to monetize its huge traffic.

Forget monetization for now. Try to get acquired by somebody who think they can make use of your traffic.

JshWright• 17 years ago

Why not a simple "Buy this on a t-shirt" link next to popular tweets? Given how easy it is to print stuff on shirts now, I'm sure someone has an API for resellers looking to put words on a t shirt.

jbenz• 17 years ago

Zazzle does. In fact, they just launched a partnership with Urban Dictionary. Every single definition now has a little "Get this on a mug" link.

http://www.zazzle.com/api

josefresco2• 17 years ago

Fark.com and CNN.com also do this. And it's an awesome idea. Geeks love snarky/one-liner tshirts.

(hint: offer them in black and in XXL)

trafficlight2• 17 years ago

I wish there were fewer black tshirts out there. I will buy any color but black.

rrival• 17 years ago

also check out printfection.com

niks• 17 years ago

fantastic idea! you gotta do the shirts. some of these lines are hilarious and most importantly original.

p.s. y combinator should have a "forgot my password" button...or if they already do, make it a little more prominent

clistctrl• 17 years ago

use your traffic numbers as a proof of popularity and sell the idea to Twitter, then let them worry about it.

davidw• 17 years ago

Sell it on to a 'greater fool'?:-)

onedognight• 17 years ago

After tweets have proved themselves, remove them from the site and hawk them to comedians. You'd just need one motivated buyer willing to spend a lot. Or better yet, use them yourself like William Shatner used Sarah Palin (giving back some to the original tweeters for an extra bonus).

parterburn• 17 years ago

The layout is bit odd to show the content; I prefer a site like fav.tweets: http://www.sixteenseven.com/fav.tweets

Ask HN: My site's popular. How would YOU monetise it?

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