holgersindbaek

Thanks for the feedback. Optimizing the ads are on my todo-list.

I improved the game and functionality over time. The game has always been above the fold, but the content was greatly revise this past year. I've been doing a lot of optimizations on the game, but nothing big. After all, it's limited how much innovation can be done a game like that .

I started a solitaire website 5+ years ago. When Covid hit, I ended up finally putting ads on it. Since then it's been growing steadily and about half a year back I made it my full-time gig.

You can check out the game here: https://online-solitaire.com/.

I wrote a post about my journey on Indie Hackers if someone is curious about it: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-simple-solita....

I'd loved to have implemented this for my chrismas themed solitaire: https://online-solitaire.com/?theme=christmas.

Good job!

Thanks . Shout-out to Greensock for making an awesome animation library. I've recently used their FLIP plugin (https://greensock.com/docs/v3/Plugins/Flip/) to make a version of 2048: https://2048-online.io/.

I've created an online solitaire platform (https://online-solitaire.com/) that's earning me $10k/m now. It started as a side-project 5 years ago, but I've recently gone full time on it.

It actually started as a Mac app 10 years ago and I choose to create a solitaire game because I had made a string of side-project that I didn't earn any money on, so I wanted to see if I could find a project that would actually generate some side-income.

I did it by scraping the Mac App Store so I could find apps that had a lot of downloads and bad reviews. I figured that if an app had a lot of downloads, but got bad reviews then I could create something better and there would be an audience for it. The app ended up making enough money that I've kept it as a side-hustle for all these years. I've written about how I picked the app here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-simple-solita....

I'm a bit late to the game on this thread, but here goes.

For the longest time I had a solitaire app for Mac that I ran as a side-hustle. A couple of years ago I programmed solitaire from scratch for the web. Fast-forward a few years and the site starts to generate some actual traffic. I then decide to put ads on it even though I thought you couldn't really earn money on ads anymore. It didn't generate a lot of money, but enough that I wanted to keep working on the site.

Today the site is earning $10.000/month from ads. It wasn't until the site started to earn $5.000/month or so that I actually started to talk to people about it.

You can try out the site here if you want: https://online-solitaire.com/.

Love it. My favorite bookmark manager.

How did you market your app to the point that it has 1m+ downloads?

Congrats with the side income .

I've kind of thought about the moral of it myself. I ended up integrating Stripe to let people remove the ads. For a blog that might not make sense, but for a solitaire website where some people play an hour or two a day, it makes sense. I think the lowest pricing I had was a one-time fee of $5 and basically no-one uses it. I'm super surpriced how few people use it. But if you won't pay for playing, you're gonna get ads . And from what I can see, people are fine with this arrangement.

Damn man. Sounds nice . What website was it?

I can't remember the specifics, but about 4 million games are played on the site each month.

It's intentional. The first 5 games are ad-free. Most of the ad-revenue are from people who stick, so I kind of try to give people the best experience the first 5 games.

Something like that .

I switched from Adsense to Freestar and have been very happy with them. I think you'll have to have a certain amount of volume to get signed with them, but it's difinitely another ballgame than Google Adsense.

Thanks .

Yes I have. Most solitaire games these days have an option of playing a fully random game or a winnable deal. The automatic deal when a user comes to the site is a winnable deal.

Haha. I'm glad you liked it .

Thanks. I'll make a note of it and take a look at it.

Congrats with the site. I've only just had a glance at it, but I think there's a lot you can do. Make it HTTPS first of all, research all keywords that relate to sudoku, write a long article about it and have it on the main page. Make sure you on-page SEO is good and keep doing off-page SEO (getting backlinks). If you want to take SEO a bit more seriously, read through a guide like this to start with: https://backlinko.com/seo-this-year. That's what I did to de-mystify SEO in the beginning.

I started with a lot less ads, but have since then put more on. I don't like it either, but people really don't mind it that much it seems. I also have an option where people can pay to remove the ads. Basically no one uses it.

I initially started with Google Adsense, but has later moved to Freestar. They basically connect you with 10+ ad networks (including Google Adsense) and then all the networks will compete for your ad space each time an ad is shown. In my experience the revenue is a lot better.

It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them.

One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spent time improving the site, optimizing speed and improving SEO. A couple of years later, the site is now earning $10k+ a month .

How do you make most of your money on visalist? Is it affiliates or ads? I have a solitaire website myself (https://online-solitaire.com/) that has ads, but I haven’t tried out affiliate links yet.

How does an NFT make you a recurring profit?

How is the revenue distributed between ads, affiliates and sponsorships? Is it just normal YouTube ads?

Thanks for the feedback. You can change the autoplay option under settings.

Yup... you can read more about my journey with the game here: https://sidehustleschool.com/episode/1767/

The website is 3-4 years old now I think. I implemented ads around 1.5 years ago. I really didn't think there was money in banner ads anymore before then actually. I sure was wrong!

Ads. They show after 5 gameplays.

Ads pop up after 5 gameplays.