[HN Gopher] Inside a viral website
___________________________________________________________________
Inside a viral website
Author : panic
Score : 623 points
Date : 2021-03-31 11:16 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (notfunatparties.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (notfunatparties.substack.com)
| runj__ wrote:
| So THATS why I was Rickrolled the other day...
| SamBam wrote:
| I'm a little confused about this point. The website had a
| random timer, and was then opening a tab in the background?
|
| I thought that modern browsers required a direct user-
| interaction to cause a new tab to appear, such as a click. I
| thought this was how we got out of the pop-up hell of the 90s?
| corobo wrote:
| The page just refreshed. No new tabs.
| ejones wrote:
| It just navigated the page itself by assigning
| window.location.href, which isn't subject to the same
| restrictions as popups.
| [deleted]
| whizzter wrote:
| Reading some of these I think that many people have the same
| usage-pattern as I do, ie go to some aggregator site like HN
| and open a bunch of articles in one sweep and then read them.
|
| So what happened was that the site opened in a tab, people
| didn't get to it immediately so when they got around to it
| the timer had fired and they were rickrolled.
| SamBam wrote:
| Ah, got it, yes re-reading the tweets I see that this is
| what happened.
| crazypython wrote:
| This is terribly overengineered. He just needs a static CDN host-
| such as Surge.sh, Netlify, AWS CloudFront, or Cloudflare.
| Everything can be calculated clientside.
|
| > It's worth pointing out that for all the criticism, the Next.js
| + Vercel combination meant that I didn't have to worry about
| scaling the site at any point. There were millions of hits, and
| sometimes thousands per second, and it all just worked. The basic
| page continued to load in less than half a second under all that
| load.
|
| Static sites have that too.
| jackdh wrote:
| S3 + Cloudfront would have worked like a charm.
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| The point is that NextJS does create a static site. And Vercel
| can be just a static CDN, as it was for this.
| migueloller wrote:
| It was a static site. That's what Vercel and Next.js does by
| default. If you don't use `getServerSideProps`, Next.js will
| generate static pages at build time and Vercel will serve them
| from their CDN.
| ape4 wrote:
| We need a website for the Mars helicopter:
| isthemarshelicopterflyingyet.com
| josefresco wrote:
| ...or maybe havetheyfoundlifeonotherplanetsyet.com
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Running a viral site by yourself is one of the most enjoyable
| feelings, like you have this big laboratory to play and test out
| things out with.
|
| And it was quite easy to do back in the early days of the
| Internet. I ran one such site in the early 2000s, which attracted
| 30 million page views per month at its peak.
|
| Like the author, I kept trying all kinds of things to monetize
| it, at the end affiliate programs and google Adsense worked the
| best.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| One thing I don't understand about monetizing on the Internet.
|
| I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and
| even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment?
| Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey
| folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page
| useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or
| Stripe or whatever, collect the money and declare it as donations
| on the IRS form? Why try all these convoluted schemes, instead of
| giving a straightforward way for people to tip?
|
| They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a
| dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the
| crazy schemes, even post-tax.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| This never works. People just don't donate. Only developers
| think donations are a viable form of monetization.
| bkanber wrote:
| For the last 10 years or so I've been running a free-to-use
| Morse Code online radio thing. It has cost me about $1000 to
| host so far, and has a couple of hundred DAUs.
|
| The users are not shy about feature requests, and they're not
| shy about complaining that I haven't implemented their feature
| requests.
|
| So I made a pledge to the userbase that if they collectively
| donate $1000 to the site, I'll start working on v2.
|
| I posted that pledge to the site a year ago. Total donations:
| $80.
|
| There are a couple of hundred people who use the site for
| _hours per day_ and post on the forums that they love it, but
| haven 't donated a fiver.
|
| Asking for donations doesn't work.
| kbenson wrote:
| So, a couple months ago, I started using a site for a game I
| play that provides maps, info on items in the game, current
| prices for the global market that players can trade on, etc.
| You can link it to your Patreon account, and if you're a
| patron for $5/mo, the site gives you historical data on the
| market, and a few other useful features for the game. There's
| also a Discord for updates, features requests, general dev
| stuff, etc, and that's gated (or some channels are at least)
| behind Patreon as well because Patreon integrates well with
| Discord, so support and feature requests (through Discord)
| come from subscribers that are paying.
|
| I mention this because at the current moment, he has 4,757
| patrons, and that $5/mo is the only official tier offered.
| That's $19k/mo, minus Patreon fees. This is the first time
| I've used a Patreon subscription to power a site account,
| which I wasn't aware could be done (I subscribe to a few web
| authors though, so I'm not new to Patreon). I think this is a
| really interesting way to provide gated site access, and it's
| fairly low fiction for a lot of people, because they either
| already use Patreon, or have at least heard of it so it's not
| some random site charging you or that you are paying. There's
| lots of benefits I see to this model, and I think if I have a
| project that fits it in the near future I'll try it myself.
| Maybe it's something that would work for you (you'd have to
| set the monthly price at something you think appropriate). $1
| from 100 people would get you that $1000 in less than a year,
| and you might also get better targeted info on what features
| the people that are willing to pay think are more important.
|
| I agree asking for donations doesn't work. I don't like
| donating like that. I _am_ willing to allocate a bit of
| monthly money to people if I feel like I 'm getting something
| worthwhile in return though (it's a limited amount, I try to
| keep total Patreon expenditure at or below ~$50/mo).
| zeropoint46 wrote:
| what game?
| kbenson wrote:
| Escape From Tarkov. It's a real interesting mix of
| shooter, stealth, and looting/management that I haven't
| really seen anywhere else. It's on the realism side of
| the spectrum, which I like. It's also extremely
| unforgiving, which is good for those that are a bit
| masochistic in their gaming, which apparently I am.
|
| There's _lots_ to unpack there that make it different
| than most other games I 've played, but you can get a
| good idea from watching some Twitch streams.
| cstrat wrote:
| I also pay for tarkov-market :D
|
| It is almost a must if you're a casual player. It is too
| hard to keep up with the barters, flea market rates and
| even just the quests and items for quests.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I understand your point, but this is just a plain old
| subscription.
| kbenson wrote:
| Yes. It's a plain old subscription in the same way that
| using a card linked to your iPhone or Android phone to
| pay for a subscription through their app stores is a
| plain old subscription.
|
| That is, it comes with lots of advantages through being
| part of an ecosystem that people may already be part of
| or at least have some trust in because it is well known.
| Additionally it's already associated with helping people
| and projects in a way that _may_ not be purely
| transactional, which fits how some people feel about
| their projects (thus the option to donate as discussed
| here).
|
| Just because two models can be boiled down to essentially
| the same thing doesn't always mean they will perform
| equally as well. Sometimes the small distinctions and
| details are very important.
| dayvid wrote:
| Makes me think of Wikipedia who have probably A/B tested
| donation requests to death and have them take up half the
| page.
| zepearl wrote:
| Wikipedia is in my opinion unluckily a complex example
| because the donations are actually for Wikimedia.
|
| In my case I donated only once to them and I understood
| only later that (apparently?) most of the $ isn't being
| used for Wikipedia, therefore as I'm not interested in
| their other projects I never donated anything anymore to
| them - they can make that banner as big&flashy as they want
| but the fact remains that I don't want my $ used for non-
| Wikipedia-related activities.
| laverya wrote:
| Not to mention WP:CANCER [0], though it's less of an
| exponential curve today than 5 years ago.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia
| _has_C...
| input_sh wrote:
| I don't know, I always feel like there has to be _some_
| reward to incentivize people, even if it 's dead simple.
|
| Like, you can choose to have your name publicly displayed on
| a thank you page (this would work well with BMAC, since
| donations can be both anonymous and not), or have your
| username be of different colour or have some badge next to
| it.
|
| But then again, I don't know how I would fit that into this
| meme page, and I'm definitely not an expert having earned a
| total of two euros of donations (yet to implement some reward
| system).
| thrashh wrote:
| I've run a few donation schemes and those things don't do
| much. People just don't donate.
|
| Subscriptions are the best, but obv that won't work for a
| meme page.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| So how does Wikipedia manage to get donations? Is it just
| a scale problem where you needs hundreds of millions of
| pageviews a day to generate any meaningful number of
| donations?
| jowsie wrote:
| Wikipedia has a lot more utility than a website about a
| current event you're gonna visit 2 or 3 times before the
| issue is resolved. It's a lot easier to justify that
| donation.
| bkanber wrote:
| Each time Wikipedia does a donation drive they have a
| thing that says "If everyone who used Wikipedia donated
| $1, we'd be done in 10 minutes!" (or similar). Yet these
| drives go on for _months_. The problem is that only a
| vanishingly small percentage of users donate.
| MisterBiggs wrote:
| I run a telegram bot that has a pretty large user base
| completely for free. I have a buy me a coffee setup for it
| and it gets almost zero views, except for when a feature
| breaks. When a feature breaks all the sudden buy me a coffee
| gets traffic and I start getting donations.
|
| Really odd to think that if everything worked perfectly all
| the time I wouldn't have made any money on this project.
| ajayyy wrote:
| Similar experience with my browser extension. A kind of
| weird mal-incentive.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| Have you tried Patreon? I had the same experience with a
| donation button. But a Patreon button magically gave us
| steady money to support infrastructure.
| zepearl wrote:
| Yeah, as a (small/tiny) donator for 3 projects so far I
| personally liked Patreon - neat, simple, it works.
|
| There are 3 other projects to which I'd like as well to
| donate something but they're all using different services (
| https://donorbox.org , https://ko-fi.com ,
| https://liberapay.com ) => I don't want to lose control
| over my donations and creating accounts there as well would
| have that effect on me.
|
| Therefore, I think that somebody that would like to receive
| donations should try make multiple options available -
| hoping for the opposite (that whoever donates will use the
| specific service that you chose) won't work.
| kbenson wrote:
| Yeah, I'm a patron of multiple people, from Authors to
| people running a website providing info on a game, that are
| making $10k-$20k a month in Patreon from those projects
| through $5-$10 monthly payments. It's amazing how much
| money you can make, but I think you really do have to offer
| something to get people to bite.
| cl0ckt0wer wrote:
| Do you show the user how much time they've used? That may
| motivate them to be more "generous".
| jawns wrote:
| Have you considered some sort of conditional pledging system?
|
| That was part of the original allure of Kickstarter:
| participants agreed to contribute money -- but they only had
| to pay it if the total pledged amount reached a certain
| threshold. That way, contributors got some assurance that
| they're not wasting their money and that any project they
| fund has some level of viability.
|
| So maybe, in your case, you could ask the users to donate
| some amount of money -- but they wouldn't have to actually
| pay it unless you reached your $1,000 funding goal.
| rapnie wrote:
| Snowdrift has a scheme like this, but even better:
| Crowdmatching, where your donation increases as more people
| jump in (and you can set a max donation).
|
| https://snowdrift.coop/
| yummybear wrote:
| Make the v2 require membership?
| sjs382 wrote:
| Another datapoint:
|
| Three years ago, I built an offline/online paper wallet
| generator[0] for what was one of the top cryptocurrencies by
| market cap (Stellar Lumens - XLM). I included a donation
| address in the footer of the page.
|
| I've received 9 donations in those three years[1], amounting
| to about 12 XLM (currently $4.87). While not much, I get a
| kick out of the idea that 9 people liked it enough to donate.
|
| Note, my costs are negligible and I've _never_ received a
| single feature request or had to do any maintenance. The code
| is hosted at GitHub Pages (free) with Cloudflare (free) in
| front of it. The only cost to me is the domain name.
|
| [0] https://stellarpaperwallet.com
|
| [1] Cloudflare only gives me analytics for the last month but
| last month it had 1,348 unique visitors.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| You are correct that asking for _donations_ doesn 't work.
|
| If you think of it as donations and you talk about it like
| donations, people view you as a "charity case" begging for
| money. Good luck with that.
|
| If you position it as tips and payment for the value you
| deliver, you can turn it into money. It's not easy, it's not
| consistent and it's probably not a way to get rich quick.
|
| But there are people who are successfully supporting their
| work with Patreon and tips as at least part of the scheme.
|
| It takes work to get money out of people. You probably didn't
| do anywhere near enough to promote the idea that "We need X
| more money to release version 2." And you probably positioned
| the request for money very poorly.
|
| Just because you didn't pull it off doesn't mean it cannot be
| done.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Most successful Patreon projects do provide extra value to
| the people who subscribe, though.
|
| In this case you might decide to provide early access to
| new features for subscribers, for example.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| This is true.
|
| But some of them just seem to very creatively thank you
| for your support. I recall reading one that waxed
| eloquent about how supporting them at the one dollar
| level would buy you a guilt-free conscience with regards
| to consuming their content or something like that.
| z3t4 wrote:
| What it comes down to is what similar services charge.
| Study the _business model_ of the other /exchangeable
| services that are actually profitable.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Has that been your experience?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Yes.
| ticviking wrote:
| Are you aware of any case studies for this kind of
| product? I'm very curious about it as a model
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| No, sorry.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Not to criticize you in any way, but I've found that asking
| me for financial support works in some cases and those are
| because I felt the "humanness" of the creator. I remember
| this author that put up a video of her unboxing first batch
| of her newly released book (and being excited about it). The
| person went from a name on a webpage or face in a video to a
| human being immediately (in my mind). I don't really have the
| words to precisely describe what I mean.
| skrebbel wrote:
| That's all true but it means that you need to market your
| person, become an "internet personality" just to collect
| donations on something technical that you built
|
| It works, true, eg Andrew Kelley is funding his Zig work
| that way and it's pretty amazing to see him ace it. But
| damn you gotta be a particular kind of person to not get
| extremely stressed out about that prospect.
| ducttapelogic wrote:
| Ah, you've beet me to it skrebbel. :) I actually wanted
| to write something like this. It's really hard to be what
| you are (in my case - a very introverted and private
| person), give something valuable to the world and
| actually live from that. That would be a beautiful life,
| really.
|
| p.s. Not saying there are no people who didn't manage to
| pull it off, but I'm pretty sure those people are
| exceptions rather than the rule.
| dmos62 wrote:
| I don't think it's mandatory to become a different kind
| of person or to market yourself in extroverted ways. I
| think you could get that effect with subtler things. I
| guess we often treat our works and online presence (as in
| open source or open access projects) as functional non-
| human items. Maybe if we saw them more as extensions of
| the author...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I bet you that this is a space where there is a reverse
| gender pay gap.
| selestify wrote:
| And also a space where nobody's going to crusade for
| fixing up the reverse gender pay gap.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Maybe your work would be better positioned for a grant of
| some kind. Is there a membership organization that many radio
| people belong to and pay dues? They'd possibly have the funds
| to make improvements to the ecosystem.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Don't call them donations. Look at what reddit did: people
| can "give gold" to people for comments that they think were
| great. All it does is add some icon to a comment and put the
| person in a "gold club".
|
| In games, people will buy so many visual improvements that
| add nothing but glam to their character.
|
| Discord does... something, I can't remember what exactly,
| with their "turbo" and IIRC it costs discord cents, but the
| user pays dollars.
|
| People will pay for the dumbest things. Give them a reason to
| sign up, add some kind of paid interaction that changes
| something visual or makes a dumb sound, add some tier system
| with context relevant names, and people might really pay.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Back in the stone ages Slashdot gave subscribers a comment
| bonus and an indication the user was a subscriber. An icon
| in the forums or some small benefit for "subscribing" goes
| a long way to get people to fork over a few dollars for
| something.
| freedomben wrote:
| I think part of the problem may be that you're still far from
| the goal. If I were a heavy user, I might consider donating
| $50. But there's a huge risk that you won't get to $1,000 and
| my money will be "wasted" (not wasted, but not bringing about
| the desired effect either). Because of that, I'm inclined not
| to do it. It seems to me like you've got a chicken and egg
| problem here.
| dgritsko wrote:
| Isn't this the problem that Kickstarter was designed to
| solve?
| pengwing wrote:
| I agree with your assessment that donations do not work. Now
| let me solve your problem: Instead of running into the
| tragedy of the commons by asking your userbase collectively
| to donate 1k, you can announce that you will start working on
| v2 now and let users pay to prioritize individual feature
| requests in each new release. Start with a small release
| adding only a feature that you want but nobody else requested
| to prove that the project is active again. Create scarcity by
| only doing 1 release / timeframe and only include the feature
| with the most money pledged. Hope for a bidding war.
| LeonB wrote:
| This was my experience too, with a useful online page I
| built. People loved it but wouldn't donate to help it.
|
| Someone suggested I productise it but I thought, based on the
| donations, that it wouldn't have many purchasers. But they
| were right: it earned orders of magnitude more when some
| features required a one time payment to be unlocked, versus
| donation.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| First 1000 words are free. After that, pay up Morse Coders!!!
| worik wrote:
| "Asking for donations doesn't work"
|
| Depends. I have paid for things I could have gotten for free,
| and raised money for political organisations (not in the USA,
| so we could not sell laws the way the Americans do).
|
| The best way to get money is to ask. There is a lot of
| research into the best ways to ask, and what gives best
| results.
|
| But just asking thoughtlessly (not accusing you, no idea how
| you asked) does not work
| PedroBatista wrote:
| > If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar,
|
| You're correct, but reality doesn't agree. It has been proven
| time and time again that 0.01% almost always DON'T leave a
| dollar for anything.
| jefftk wrote:
| For Bucket Brigade I ask for donations [1] which has covered
| about 50% of my costs so far [2]. I think how well this works
| depends a lot on how useful people find your site vs what your
| costs are?
|
| [1] https://echo.jefftk.com/#About
|
| [2] https://www.jefftk.com/bucket-brigade-payments
| draw_down wrote:
| Do you think people just haven't tried this, or something? They
| didn't think of it?
|
| People try other things because this doesn't work, in general.
| codingdave wrote:
| Reverse that - how many websites do you visit, and look for a
| way to give them a dollar?
|
| It just isn't how web audiences operate. I'm not saying that it
| is a bad idea - paying for good content could solve many
| problems. It just isn't where we are today.
| brentm wrote:
| The best path probably would of been getting in touch with
| Flexport and getting them to sponsor it for a couple grand +
| hosting.
| twox2 wrote:
| Who would pay $1 for getting a chuckle out of a meme? Also 50
| million views is not 50 million visitors. If he had a normal ad
| monetization channel in place, he should have easily been able
| to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM and walked away with at
| least $5k from his 15 minutes of fame. The problem is that
| learning as you go makes it a little too late to monetize the
| peak. There are companies whose entire business is in pumping
| out viral sites like this. Some explode for a a little while
| and others never make a penny. You can bet your butt that in
| the hands of someone who does this professionally these 50
| million views would have been thousands and thousands of
| dollars.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > Who would pay $1 for getting a chuckle out of a meme?
|
| That sort of feels like the core issue. Why even try to
| monetise a page like this?
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| In the article he mentioned this; he was worried about the
| hosting costs. Thankfully his host got a laugh out of it
| and donated the hosting cost and he has in turn donated any
| proceeds.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Right, but if you're incurring significant hosting costs
| for a static site in 2021 then you're doing something
| wrong.
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| In hindsight, you're right. And obviously I didn't.
| However at the time, it was the uncertainty as a result
| of never having done something like this that made me
| worried.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| unless you have images?
| filoleg wrote:
| Cloudflare Pages[0] claims to have unlimited bandwidth,
| even for their free tier.
|
| 0. https://pages.cloudflare.com/#plans
| rchaud wrote:
| Hosting costs money. Although for someone who's go-to stack
| for a meme website is NextJS + React could probably afford
| to fork over $70 for 15 minutes of Internet fame.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Hosting costs pennies (if even that) if you're just
| serving static html content.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| If you can build a PaaS around it like Giphy and sell user
| data, sure.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Yeah but Giphy's a full on product, not just a static
| single page site.
| rebelde wrote:
| > he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a
| 10 cent CPM
|
| Uh, not in my experience. I haven't tried to monetize a site
| like this, but I would expect a CPM around 1 cent. Still,
| times 50 million, it isn't nothing.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| In the grim future of 2050, we have finally implemented
| micropayments on the Internet, down to amounts as tiny as a
| thousandth of one cent and trending downward as we account
| for hyperinflation of other currencies. Advanced
| technologies, ubiquitous computing, brilliant algorithms,
| and near-sentient fraud watchdog programs have combined to
| make this dream at last possible.
|
| Only then we will have proved that the vast majority of
| people will not pay a dime for content on the web.
| troydavis wrote:
| > I would expect a CPM around 1 cent. Still, times 50
| million, it isn't nothing.
|
| CPM is cost per mille, AKA cost per thousand impressions.
| Revenue from 50,000,000 impressions would be CPM * 50,000.
| twox2 wrote:
| It's tough as an individual that's just dipping their toes
| into the water, but if you have some experience, then you
| typically have an optimized setup with partners in place,
| etc.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Reddit gold seems to fit here. It makes no sense to me but it
| seems to be working. I find it funny the threads complaining
| about Reddit's recent horrible hiring an mod decisions all
| had TONS of gold lol
| T-hawk wrote:
| Reddit gold makes tons of sense. People can pay money to
| amplify the opinions they want amplified. Reddit actually
| monetized internet arguing.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Reddit actually monetized internet arguing.
|
| I never thought about it like this. I always just thought
| of Reddit Gold as just another weird Internet quirk I
| will never understand.
|
| I kind of wonder if NFTs for artwork will become the same
| thing. Like amplifying comments, maybe high NFT prices
| will be a way to amplify one artist over another in what
| is a very crowded marketplace.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I would, particularly if the blurb was very honest (or very
| creative). I have no trouble throwing someone even a one-time
| $5 if the website is funny enough.
| pjc50 wrote:
| How often do you do this per month?
|
| How many webpages do you read per month?
|
| Now divide one by the other.
| rchaud wrote:
| IMO this wouldn't be a bad thing. There would be a
| stronger market mechanism at play here. It could cut down
| on the amount of garbage internet we consume, while
| incentivizing producers to create higher-value content
| that people will pay for, and that won't be forgotten
| immediately like this Suez website.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| Zero times. They never have.
|
| When people give the "oh yeah I'd be generous" spiel,
| they're lying. Indeed, they're usually the _cheapest_ of
| all (in the same way that the people who tell you how
| generous they are with tips are usually the ones who
| stiff wait staff).
| colpabar wrote:
| Unfortunately you are in the extreme minority. I was
| watching a stream on youtube that has an optional patreon
| subscription and people were complaining that $0.99 per
| MONTH was too much because the stream was too quiet for a
| bit.
|
| Paying directly for things you like on the internet doesn't
| seem like a big deal to us here on HN, but the overwhelming
| majority of people will never even consider it. Everything
| else is free, why should anyone have to pay for anything?
| rchaud wrote:
| IMO the pricing itself signals that the product isn't
| worth paying for. $0.99 per month? For what I'm sure
| includes hours of streaming? It's close enough to $0 that
| I don't even think about whether an additional buck is
| going to make a difference.
| danparsonson wrote:
| I suspect 0.01% is highly optimistic, especially for a meme-
| related site that's essentially a drive-by laugh for most
| people.
| oefrha wrote:
| If my developer tool with thousands of stars on GitHub
| generates $15/yr in donations, I would say 0.01% of visitors
| each donating $1 to a website they on average spend 1 minute or
| less on (seems a reasonable assumption?) is far too optimistic.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Can you give any other metric for its popularity? Stars
| aren't a good one - Github stars are _bookmarks_ , not a
| reflection of whether one actually uses a given repository.
| Personally, I have 301 starred repositories, of which I maybe
| use... 5?
| oefrha wrote:
| I'd say a repo needs more than 150k views to get ~5k stars.
| I can confidently say the number of users who derive actual
| value from it is measured in the hundreds at least
| (compared to none on a viral meme site). If those views
| aren't generating 0.01% * $1, I can bet the house on viral
| meme site not generating that much, unless they happen to
| land very generous donors.
|
| Edit: Just checked Homebrew analytics. >10k recorded
| installs in the past year (low single digit number of
| releases during that period, no major publicity event). I
| don't have readily available analytics for other
| installation channels on macOS, or analytics for Linux and
| Windows which are pretty fractured. Point is the user base
| is sizable.
| spijdar wrote:
| I think regardless of how good a metric stars are, it's
| still more likely to receive donations than a meme site
| about a recent event.
|
| I can't remember ever hearing someone talk about how
| successful their donation button was. I can remember plenty
| of people describing how few people ever click it,
| though...
| WJW wrote:
| Stars are even worse than bookmarks, they're more like
| likes on social media. Costs nothing and worth nothing,
| literally imaginary internet validation points. "Oh this is
| a cool thing, I'll star it why not."
| Kalium wrote:
| The conventional wisdom on the internet, often backed by common
| experience, is that significantly less than 0.01% of visitors
| leave a dollar. Internet donation plates are not known for
| producing consistent revenue.
| rchaud wrote:
| > They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a
| dollar
|
| If it wasn't a simple meme website to spend 5 seconds on and
| never visit again, it would not have gotten 50 million views.
| Trying to monetize that is like squeezing blood from a stone.
|
| I imagine that's one reason why he's posting this from a
| Substack domain.
| mrtksn wrote:
| >They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a
| dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all
| the crazy schemes, even post-tax.
|
| IMHO that is a fallacy. Although %0.01 looks like a really
| small number there's no reason for it for not being %0.001 or
| %0.000001. When people do napkin math , it's a common theme to
| say that "If we only capture %1 of the market we would be
| $$$rich$$$" and they proceed to find out that there are smaller
| percentiles than %1.
|
| To receive donations people need to be sympathetic to you or
| your cause. You need to actively sell it, making it a
| considerable part of the user experience.
|
| It's really hard to build that relationship with just one
| visit. Maybe there are visitors deeply invested in the
| situation and they may actually obsess with your product but
| you need to look into the analytics to see if it's the case. If
| there are visitors that appear to be visiting extremely
| frequently, you need to explore ways to ask for the money and
| for that you will need data(profiles of the visitors) to
| develop your message however the OP doesn't do detailed
| analytics and profiling. It could be possible to monetise it
| and even catch a few whales but chances are that you can also
| alienate those people with the wrong messaging, so you probably
| will need to do personalisation which requires data and cookies
| and what not, which means data collection and sharing
| permission popups.
|
| Of course you can try your chances and pick a group of people
| that you believe are using your product and proceed with A/B
| testing etc instead of profiling. If you happen to choose the
| privacy nerds as a target you will find out how much the
| privacy nerds like donating.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| >IMHO that is a fallacy.
|
| Email spam works exactly this way. I think what you are
| pointing out correctly, is that the _percentage_ might be
| incorrect; the principle is not.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The "principle" is just multiplication, and yes, if you
| multiply your number of visitors by a number that you make
| up, you can get any number you want as a result.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I don't think that spam is a fair comparison. Spammers send
| out offer for stuff that people want. It's completely
| different than first giving out what people want and then
| asking for a gratitude payment.
|
| Spam's success rate would be dictated by the percentage of
| the people who want the product in the general population
| after passing through the spam delivery funnel.
|
| With the donations it's completely different mechanism.
|
| Nevertheless, the fallacy is that small looking number of
| market share is the smallest possible market share.
| tjs8rj wrote:
| The fallacy comes from forgetting these are people. "Surely
| theres 1 in 10,000 who want this" is wishful thinking,
| "There exists a type of person who wants this, and I can
| point to them, but they happen to be a small segment of the
| population - 1 in 10,000" is actionable and valid.
|
| There's nearly 8,000,000,000 humans, so there's a ton of
| variety that one can't even imagine, but probably none of
| them want to eat a bar of soap for breakfast each day even
| if you think there must be some rare 1 in 1,000,000 out
| there.
|
| Putting 1 in BIG NUMBER is just a way we abstract away hard
| and intimidating questions.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The fallacy comes from forgetting these are people._
|
| Perhaps. But at least that's just on paper. Resorting to
| advertising means _actually_ forgetting your visitors are
| people.
| jahewson wrote:
| Hey, if it was a $10 donation they'd only need 0.001% of users
| and for $100 just 0.0001%.
|
| /s
| jahewson wrote:
| Hmm, if was a $10 donation they'd only need 0.001% of users and
| for $100 just 0.0001%. Boom!!
|
| But yeah 1/1000 people are not going to randomly pay for
| something with a market price of $0.
| carabiner wrote:
| > If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar...
|
| 0.01% is a fantasy, massively high conversion rate, just so you
| know.
| davedx wrote:
| > Couldn't they just [...]
|
| :D
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yes :). But otherwise, the question is serious.
| passivate wrote:
| >Why try all these convoluted schemes, instead of giving a
| straightforward way for people to tip?
|
| >They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a
| dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all
| the crazy schemes, even post-tax.
|
| Currently ads are the easiest way to monetize a not-well-known
| web property in the short-term. Long-term you can build a
| brand/trust/community/etc and leverage that into
| patreon/donations.
| rikroots wrote:
| > Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the
| page [...] In the end it was successful, selling for just over
| $200
|
| ... It was at this point in the read that I got very excited and
| broke away from the article to research "NFTs"[1] - because I've
| been known to create digital art[2] and I've even written a JS
| library to help people create digital art[3] (kinda). Luckily I
| got interrupted during my research and, once the interruption
| completed, I returned to the article rather than my research tabs
| - which were closed pretty quickly after the read completed.
|
| > Most of the things I've posted [to Twitter] are liked
| exclusively by my colleagues, my Mum and my ex-flatmate. It's
| screaming into the void.
|
| My Mother doesn't do social media. I doubt she'd approve of the
| words I choose to scream.
|
| [1] https://www.creativebloq.com/features/what-are-nfts - "NFTs
| use a monster amount of energy in their creation. So much so that
| many protesters are worried about the very real impact the craze
| could have on the environment" ... this is seriously scary; it
| puts me off the whole idea of trying to monetise my creative work
| in this way.
|
| [2] https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv - my collection of
| generative art on CodePen
|
| [3] https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/
| tambourine_man wrote:
| > I found this exchange very fun
|
| This guy is such a good sport. Unsolicited and impolite random
| critics of your tech stack on Twitter: fun.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| It is fascinating how our online behavior deviates from our
| physical world behavior.
|
| This whole thread is about how asking for donations is a big fail
| online.
|
| Yet, there's no lack of street performers in most major metros.
| Whether that is people in superhero costumes on Hollywood Blvd,
| or street dancers in times square, they all seem to be doing fine
| off donations.
|
| There is something about the online "free duplicate copy" concept
| that just makes value dissappear
| elevaet wrote:
| Maybe it's not the "free duplicate copy" making the value
| disappear, but that the social context makes us feel anonymous
| and less obliged to reciprocate on the web.
|
| We're a social species that evolved in tribes. Street
| performers probably do a better job of stimulating that sense
| of tribe than abstract interactions on a web page do.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >Whether that is people in superhero costumes on Hollywood
| Blvd, or street dancers in times square, they all seem to be
| doing fine off donations.
|
| All websites are not comparable to Times Square or Hollywood
| Blvd, in terms of how much attention they get. You also don't
| see performers in 99.99% of cities, even in other areas of the
| same city like NYC and LA.
| bemmu wrote:
| Donations seem to work for livecasters though. Maybe the
| donation button needs to give some response like that from the
| creator to work?
| vulcan01 wrote:
| > they all seem to be doing fine off donations.
|
| They may be doing fine, but I bet that, for most, donations
| aren't their only source of income and they probably have
| another job.
| paxys wrote:
| Yup, people are just wired to think of physical vs digital
| goods or experiences very differently. Cliche comparison by
| now, but I know so many people who will spend $4 on a Starbucks
| latte every day, but the thought of spending $4 _a month_ on a
| web app that they use for hours every day is unimaginable.
| ducharmdev wrote:
| I'd argue that people have been taught to expect it to be
| free. When fundamental services like search, email, chat,
| etc. are provided to consumers for free, why shouldn't other
| services be free too?
|
| Of course we know these services aren't really free; Google
| and Facebook still run their services on physical servers
| that have hosting costs. But by making their apps free and
| finding alternative revenue streams (i.e. selling data), they
| can set norms that harm competitors with less capital while
| making it easier to adopt new users (and collect more data).
| worik wrote:
| Well done!
|
| Almost perfect.
| migueloller wrote:
| I know the HN comments section is notorious for criticizing
| solutions they don't like because they seem too complex or
| unnecessary for them [1] but I'm honestly surprised that's
| happening with Next.js/Vercel here.
|
| So many are saying that this could've been a static site
| distributed by a CDN. That's what a Next.js app on Vercel does by
| default! Unless you use `getServerSideProps`, Next.js will create
| a static site at build time and when deployed to Vercel it will
| be hosted on their CDN. Spending just a bit of time to understand
| why Next.js is so popular would've made that clear to most people
| here. But I guess that's not as easy as just criticizing it for
| bloat without knowing how it works and moving on?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| sneak wrote:
| Javascript aside, more things can and should be static sites.
|
| (More things should render their basic, static-site content
| without having to exec js, too.)
|
| The web would be a lot better if this were the case.
| migueloller wrote:
| I believe you can still do this in Next.js with some extra
| work to exclude the JS bundle. For example, you can use a
| custom `_document` page and exclude the `NextScript`
| component [1]. It would be nice if this was supported as a
| first-class concept, though.
|
| [1] https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/custom-document
| simias wrote:
| >Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the
| page. I'd read a fair amount about NFTs (both good and bad), and
| I was a mix of sceptical and curious. I thought this would be an
| interesting and weird opportunity to try it out myself. Added to
| this, it could be a fun meta-meme. I thought it would be fun to
| be the first meme website to sell itself as an NFT.
|
| I don't quite understand, what was sold here exactly? You can't
| sell the DNS since ".com" doesn't exist on the blockchain (you
| could for a NameCoin domain, but who uses that). So is it like a
| capture of the source code? Or is it really just a token saying
| "istheshipstillstuck.com"?
|
| I can sort of get NFTs when it's about selling digital artwork
| since it's a way for the artist to generate artificial scarcity
| for something that's technically endlessly copiable and it
| creates a notion of what's "the original". After all, IP laws and
| regulations are full of that stuff (cue the "what colour are your
| bits" essay).
|
| But here there's already a digital token that's unique and can be
| auctioned: the domain name itself. It's pretty obvious to me that
| the "true" istheshipstillstuck.com will be whoever owns the DNS,
| not some random person with an NFT token.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Yes, NFT's are one of the weirdest blockchain related
| scams/pyramid schemes yet.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > pyramid scheme
|
| Could this be a pyramid scheme? From my (very limited)
| understanding of the technology, it is basically a single-
| sell item - so the value you get out of it does not depend on
| whether they take off or cease to exists post-buy. A pyramid
| doesn't really fit to this. Or am I missing something?
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| good point.
|
| I'm used to applying "pyramid scheme" to "i buy this thing
| not cause I want it but just hoping I can sell it to
| someone else for more money later, and they're going to be
| doing the same thing as me." Cause that is likely to leave
| someone holding the bag. But I guess that is an overlapping
| phenomenon that may not be the same as a pyramid scheme.
|
| What do we call that phenomenon? Just "capitalism"?
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| A pyramid scheme pays out fake returns that were actually
| new investments, which requires unsustainable geometric
| growth. An asset bubble doesn't depend on fraud or
| growth, it just keeps going until speculators' confidence
| is shaken.
| redisman wrote:
| A pyramid is a more psychologically powerful scam as many
| people actually get big returns and become true
| believers. Made up assets are more akin to the tulip
| mania and such.
| redisman wrote:
| Well since "ICO"s seem to be dead you gotta come up with
| something new to split the fools from their money.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I think he was hoping for a Beeple-like windfall such as from
| Elon Musk or an early crypto adopter...a huge right-tail in
| terms of potential profit. No dice though.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I think he's just playing around/being cheeky with all this
| stuff, so I don't think it was ever meant to stand up to robust
| scrutiny :>
| simias wrote:
| I completely get that, but I was thinking from the point of
| view of the person who decided to put $200 into the joke.
| platz wrote:
| even with art, an NFT doesn't confer copyright rights, so you
| don't even own the art.
|
| > a way for the artist to generate artificial scarcity
|
| The art isn't stored on-chain, so it's not scarce either.
|
| All the NFT is is a pointer that has some text about who
| created it and what it points to. Not sure why why that
| _pointer itself_ is valuable except as a status of "i am the
| only one that owns this unique pointer".
|
| Of course there's nothing stopping anyone from creating another
| pointer that points to the same thing as the one you just
| bought and selling that.
|
| So unless you find some value in pointers, intrinsically in
| themselves, NFT's are useless.
| gumby wrote:
| It's valuable because someone felt it was.
|
| It's the pet rock of 2021.
| platz wrote:
| https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420
| 0...
|
| > Link to a print-ready high-resolution image file will be
| unlocked on purchase (2048 x 2048 pixels).
|
| LOL
| martin_a wrote:
| As somebody working in the printing industry, I would not
| call that "printable", but okay...
|
| (Except you don't want your art to be printed in a
| reasonable size.)
| tyrust wrote:
| It's like a signed baseball card, where it is signed by whoever
| is selling the NFT. The cardboard and ink is worthless, but add
| the signature and you have something.
|
| When the signer matches the creator (e.g. beeple selling NFTs
| of his art, this guy selling an NFT of his site), the
| interesting part isn't really the thing, but the signature.
| joosters wrote:
| _I don 't quite understand, what was sold here exactly?_
|
| This question applies to all NFTs! All you 'own' is a smart
| contract on a blockchain. That contract might contain a URL,
| and that URL _might_ have some content on it. Or it could be a
| broken link. But you definitely do _not_ own the thing that the
| URL points to. Nor do you have any guarantee that there are no
| other NFTs on the blockchain using that same URL.
|
| Luckily enough for the scammers/sellers, the buyers don't seem
| to care about these details!
| simias wrote:
| Oh, so normally NFTs don't actually contain the digital
| artwork, just a reference to it?
|
| I assumed that the art itself would be stored into the
| blockchain, which would give it some form of permanence.
| WJW wrote:
| That only works for digital things, for obvious reasons.
| PavleMiha wrote:
| The vast majority of NFT's sell art that is not on the
| blockchain, is hosted somewhere else. There are some pixel
| art-y small things that people have put on the actual
| blockchain but it's rare.
| another_sock wrote:
| Yeah, most NFTs are just references to a database hosting a
| file somewhere. There are exceptions, but this is the case
| with sites like Rarible as far as I know. The exceptions
| are less popular and less well known because they aren't
| scams and are actually interesting technology-wise, and
| thus aren't doing a ton of marketing or promotion or being
| used for money laundering or tax scams like most NFTs
| currently are.
| henvic wrote:
| NFT is just a joke went too far.
|
| I'm starting to consider creating a NFT to sell NFTs of NFTs
| emitted elsewhere. Or one for people who doesn't "own an asset"
| to sell it.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| NFT-backed securities are both inevitable and worrying.
| kamel3d wrote:
| That's why I still think NFTs are scam
| ihuman wrote:
| How is it a scam if you get exactly what you paid for?
| austhrow743 wrote:
| Was wondering just yesterday how much those book affiliate links
| made. Before reading my guess would have been way higher.
| dx034 wrote:
| Interestingly, according to [1] there were only ~11k visitors
| from Hackernews for a post on the front page that had ~1k
| comments. I would've estimated the visitor/comment ratio to be
| much, much higher.
|
| [1]
| https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_sour...
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Every post is different.
|
| Viral or click bait stuff on "hot" topics can foster a lot of
| insubstantive and often fighty comments. That's a known
| phenomenon on the site.
| [deleted]
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| I only put simple analytics on the site the day after it was at
| the top of Hacker News (unfortunately)
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| For what it's worth (and I know this is getting extremely
| meta), but as it stands this writeup has had 21,963 visitors
| from Hacker News. (205 comments as I write this).
| mtberatwork wrote:
| Users tend to overwhelmingly read headlines and skip articles.
| HN is not any different than the rest of the Web. Something to
| keep in mind here and elsewhere.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Besides the analytics being added later (as mentioned),
| personally I see a headline sometimes and think "yeah I know
| enough, show me the comments".
|
| Does HN show viewing stats for comments? Might be nice for the
| sites featured on it to know.
| themanmaran wrote:
| I had a HN frontpage post a couple months ago.
|
| The results:
|
| - 250 upvotes
|
| - 101 comments
|
| - 6,675 site views (over the 1.5 days it was frontpage)
| underdeserver wrote:
| This is a glowing recommendation for Vercel. I might use it for
| my next side project.
| zepearl wrote:
| Great article - funny & interesting :)
|
| Question about "Ads/advertisements" (I'm totally clueless about
| how they work):
|
| Does anybody have a link pointing to some kind of overview from
| the point of view of a website owner? (e.g. list of different
| providers, amounts paid by views/clicks, which informations
| are/can be exchanged with them to provide for example an ad in
| the same context of what the website is showing, etc...?)
|
| Personally as a user, I would not be against ads if they would be
| normal ones like in a newspaper/magazine, but many show full-
| fledged small&big animations => I get angry when I see my CPU
| usage at 100%/my fan spinning up/my battery depleting while
| reading on such a page, which is the main if not the only reason
| why I block them (I might even be interested in them, but they
| screw up my PC/notebook) => as a website owner do you have
| control on what kind of ads you want to show (technically
| speaking - like "animated" vs. "static", with how many fps,
| etc...)?
| pbrw wrote:
| I wonder why almost the same website didn't go viral at such
| scale. Even though it was published earlier.
| l00sed wrote:
| I'd love if someone could point me in the direction of WHY this
| Next.js setup "just works". This was a great article, and the
| author described the sensation of getting traffic very well. I've
| been on the other side of the coin where my apache server crashed
| or 50* error'd out. It would be interesting to know more about
| what makes this stack or this server architecture "just work"
| under the hug of death.
| dopeboy wrote:
| I'm very new to it and one thing I really like about building
| in it is that there is no react-router. It bakes in routing and
| I've found that to be such a more pleasant experience than
| chasing around how react-router has changed.
| quicksnap wrote:
| I've been working with Next for a couple of weeks, here's my
| take:
|
| - Next.js aims for "pit of success" in building sites with
| React that are optimized for CDNs and small builds
|
| - Deploying said sites to Vercel takes advantage of the CDNs,
| so most of the users are getting cached data.
|
| So, for this site, I would assume:
|
| - There is no backend - All the HTML is cached and contains a
| static generation of the page(s)
|
| - The javascript is also cached
|
| - Vercel CDN is fast.
|
| That's it!
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Adding to quicksnap's points:
|
| - Next.js makes it dead-easy to statically generate your pages
| using various strategies. And static pages take few resources
| to serve. [0]
|
| - It also gives you lots of info on bundle sizes, performance,
| and provides you with the tools to manage these.
|
| - Vercel is optimised to serve these static pages on their CDN.
| [1] And your project quite literally a single terminal command
| away from being live.
|
| - Both are very easy to get started with and a joy to use.
|
| - I am in no way affiliated with Vercel. I just like their
| products.
|
| [0] https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching
|
| [1] https://vercel.com/docs/edge-network/overview
| mromanuk wrote:
| > As was pointed out in a quote tweet by the Vercel CEO, the
| problem wasn't Next.js at all, but the Vesselfinder embedded map
| taking a while to load (because everyone wanted to check the Ever
| Given's status)
|
| That was an opportunity, to cache the map as an image, and switch
| it later to the proper map.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| But is it worth the trouble for a meme site that won't be
| relevant in a week? There are probably more fun things to do
| with your time.
| rainonmoon wrote:
| He minted the site as an NFT. Dude had time.
| oefrha wrote:
| > These reports aren't just limited to the products you recommend
| -- if someone buys anything within a 24 hour period of clicking
| your link, you can see, and you get commission.
|
| Anyone else find this a pretty gross violation of privacy on
| Amazon's part? Why should your unrelated purchases be disclosed
| to affiliates just because you clicked an affiliate link for
| whatever reason? Let's say the affiliate website use accounts or
| know the identities of users through another channel, and track
| outbound clicks. With few enough clicks, they can exactly
| correlate your unrelated purchases with you, if I understand this
| correctly. In fact it seems you can easily prank unsuspecting
| acquaintances this way.
|
| To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting commission
| on random stuff.
|
| Edit: I can also see why the data could be valuable to marketers.
| Jorge1o1 wrote:
| Heh, if you think that's bad... there's a certain popular "#1
| Money Saving Hack", coupon-clipping browser extension (wink
| wink) that sees everything you buy on practically every major
| e-commerce site even when you didn't use one of their coupon
| codes.
|
| And then said browser extension, which promised to never ever
| sell your data to a third party, got bought out by PayPal for 4
| billion USD.
|
| Really makes you think.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _And then said browser extension, which promised to never
| ever sell your data to a third party, got bought out by
| PayPal for 4 billion USD._
|
| I guess selling the whole company owning the data isn't
| technically selling data to third parties...
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Check out any privacy policy that says they will never
| share or sell your data; the two boilerplate exceptions are
| law enforcement and transfering ownership of the parent
| entity. Two pretty big loopholes.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| This led me to look up Honey's own privacy policy and I
| do not see such a disclaimer regarding change of
| ownership, in fact it specifically references what they
| can share with PayPal. [0]
|
| >We know how important your personal data is to you, so
| we will never sell it. We'll only share it with your
| consent or in ways you'd expect (as we explain here).
| That means we will share your data if needed to complete
| your purchase, with businesses who help us operate Honey,
| or if we are legally required to do so.
|
| >We may also share information in the following
| cases:...with our parent company, PayPal, Inc. and
| affiliates and subsidiaries it controls, but only for
| purposes allowed by this Privacy Policy;
|
| So that sounds like commercial use of personal data is
| specifically protected with regards to the new parent.
| The policy does specify they can share your data in an
| "aggregate or anonymized format" without any caveats,
| though.
|
| Sure does still raise the question of what PayPal spent
| $4bn on. From what I can read online, online retailers
| see a lot of benefit from the way Honey incentivizes
| users to complete a purchase instead of abandon the cart.
|
| [0]https://www.joinhoney.com/privacy
| akiselev wrote:
| That is the privacy policy that users agree to if they
| joined post acquisition (probably because Paypal doesn't
| expect to sell it at this time), which is different than
| the policy that users agreed to when they joined pre-
| acquisition. They may have been forced to accept the new
| policy post acquisition anyway.
|
| I think the weasel is this nibble here:
|
| _> but only for purposes allowed by this Privacy
| Policy;_
|
| The privacy policy is between the user and Honey, not the
| user and PayPal, which implies they are still legally
| separate entities ("parent company"). Unless Honey has an
| agreement with Paypal that it can audit and enforce -
| which as a subsidiary, why would it want to - then once
| PayPal has the data, its actual use of it is governed by
| the privacy policy between the user and PayPal if there
| is an existing relationship or ???
|
| It sounds like all Honey and Paypal need to do is find a
| half plausible justification from the PP for the data
| transfer; once it's handed over, Paypal is basically free
| to do whatever it wants.
| woofcat wrote:
| Uhh those seem like two really small loopholes. Buying
| the whole company makes sense. What is the alternative,
| the purchasing company has to accept that they'll purge
| all user accounts?
|
| Law enforcement.. What do you want them to do? Turn down
| a legal court order and say "naaa"?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Uhh those seem like two really small loopholes. Buying
| the whole company makes sense. What is the alternative,
| the purchasing company has to accept that they 'll purge
| all user accounts?_
|
| Why not? The alternative is to allow a business model, in
| which you start a company with the sole purpose of
| vacuuming up data and delivering it to highest bidder by
| getting acquired.
| [deleted]
| joekrill wrote:
| You can't match up the product with an actual user or person in
| any way.
| inetknght wrote:
| Oh, no definitely not. Nope. There's no way that a company
| can see that you've purchased Some Things within the past 24
| hours and definitely can't correlate those purchases with
| receipts. Nope that's not a thing. Definitely not. No way at
| all. Especially since companies aren't owned by parent
| companies. That would totally be impossible.
|
| /s
| jordansmith wrote:
| Correct. As the affiliate blog you see nothing involving
| receipts or personal info for purchasers. It's just a
| jumble of all your referral purchases
| egfx wrote:
| Unrelated but on Amazon is it possible to get order
| details if you have an order ID? You used to be able to
| scrape email for details but now you just get the ID
| itself.
| oefrha wrote:
| Create a web page of various recommendations, send it to a
| specific friend whose household regularly makes purchases on
| Amazon. Unsuspecting friend clicks on affiliate link, now you
| know all things they buy in the next 24 hours.
|
| Works anywhere else where the audience can be identified, and
| click frequency is low.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| I think seeing all the random items is collateral damage. It
| can possibly be fixed (only show purchases in the category that
| you referred?).
|
| As the affiliate, the insights are invaluable. Imagine you
| hosted a sleep blog and directed people to a particular memory
| foam pillow. If you saw they ended up purchasing a different
| pillow, you could change the link to better serve your readers.
|
| Or if you saw that they ended up purchasing essential oils,
| perhaps you'd want to write a post about using oil diffusers to
| fall asleep.
|
| The affiliate link tracking is supposed to give you a better
| picture of your audience. Usually it works, but getting 50M
| views from every source on the internet is obviously a case
| where there's no common "audience".
| inetknght wrote:
| > * Imagine you hosted a sleep blog and directed people to a
| particular memory foam pillow. If you saw they ended up
| purchasing a different pillow, you could change the link to
| better serve your readers.*
|
| If I buy a memory foam pillow from company B instead of
| company A then I don't want company A to know at all. If I
| wanted company A to know then I would tell company A why I
| didn't purchase its product.
|
| Maybe it _was_ that I didn 't see company A's product. Or
| maybe it's because company A is a piece of garbage. Maybe
| it's because company A employs deceptive practices and I
| don't want to give company A my money.
| jordansmith wrote:
| In that example company A isn't the one who sees it or gets
| money. It's the third party sleep blog who you just clicked
| a link on for "top 5 memory foam pillows". Now they see
| which one people buy most and can give that the favorable
| rating
| rideontime wrote:
| Shouldn't the blog be giving the favorable rating to the
| pillow they think is the best, not the one that's most
| likely to sell through?
| SamBam wrote:
| No one doubts that it's useful for the people standing to
| make money off of this. I think the question was whether it
| was an invasion of the reader's privacy, who probably don't
| realize that the blog owner can now track their buying
| habits.
| LordAtlas wrote:
| Only in the aggregate. The site owner doesn't know who
| purchased what. Only Amazon (obviously) knows.
|
| The site owner only sees that 35 people bought book X while
| 24 people bought book Y.
| SamBam wrote:
| Anonymous data can easily become identifiable when it's
| small enough, as GP was saying.
|
| If someone runs a tiny blog that they attempt to monetize
| with affiliate links, and one of their only readers at
| the moment is their mother, I don't think they'd be happy
| seeing that one of their readers purchased a sex toy.
| lancesells wrote:
| And then what does that say about the written article? It's
| just metrics driven for what is the "best". It's truly a
| terrible system that's taken place over the last 20 years or
| so.
| vharuck wrote:
| Why not ask people for this kind of stuff in an honest[1]
| way? If that doesn't work well because people rarely want to
| share that information, collecting _without_ asking doesn 't
| seem right.
|
| [1] By "honest", I mean like a pop-up with a question or two
| and a clear "Not now" button. Not another cookie banners or
| passive collection.
| artembugara wrote:
| I think it's simply because you do forward someone on a
| website.
|
| Also, imagine it's not Amazon but a much smaller website. Just
| bringing a client (someone who actually paid) is already a good
| deal.
|
| So, I believe it's a totally fair commission rule.
| oefrha wrote:
| I made it very clear that I have no problem with the
| commission paid:
|
| > To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting
| commission on random stuff.
|
| The problem is disclosing random purchases. You can pay a
| commission without that disclosure.
| artembugara wrote:
| Ah damn. I somehow misread your initial message. My bad.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| Regarding the Amazon affiliate marketing bit: I am surprised he
| didn't make at least an order of magnitude more money from the
| clicks.
|
| I ran a site that was popular on a niche subreddit in 2013-2014
| which had Amazon affiliate links. On the very first day when the
| site was the top post, the resulting affiliate commissions were
| over $500. And most of them were not for products that were
| linked to on the site. The lifetime commissions earned was about
| $11K from a total of maybe 100K unique visitors. The biggest
| contributor to the commissions were unrelated expensive purchases
| that visitors made later on Amazon. I'm curious if the affiliate
| program changed in the 8 years since.
| alexey2020 wrote:
| So much enjoyed the reading! I like that kind of stuff - nothing
| serious and lots of fun. Well done!
| artembugara wrote:
| Neat. Could anyone give me some ideas how else the author could
| monetize this without normal ads?
|
| Also, what would be the gain if he did normal ads?
| kevinstubbs wrote:
| Hey, I run an ad tech company. Our targets for US traffic are
| about $10 USD per thousand page views. This is multiples more
| than what you would get from AdSense, plus we help with
| strategy and integration.
|
| Besides that, the author did mention several things he tried
| besides ad monetization. I think the most effective thing would
| have been to either find an opportunistic brand that wants to
| advertise here (like a maritime company or something) for like
| $25 CPM+, or to quickly find somebody to sell it to if you have
| those kinds of connections that trust you already. Lots of
| people trying to build businesses based off of a network of
| "micro sites".
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| Damn I wish you hadn't posted. Ah well.
| kevinstubbs wrote:
| LOL, interesting response. Well feel free to reach out to
| me (check my profile) and let me know why. I'm very curious
| :)
| artembugara wrote:
| I think it's because he is the creator of that website.
| And he missed all that value.
| soared wrote:
| $10 rpm, lol what do you only accept finance and law blogs?
| rcar1046 wrote:
| $10 PAGE RPM is the key here people. Not a great metric to
| go by. Ad impression RPM is the number to compare. I'd be
| interested to know the average number of ads/page you need
| to display to achieve a $10 rpm. At any rate, you can get
| that on AdSense no problem with very little hassle and net
| 30 payments.
| kevinstubbs wrote:
| Ah I wish, those would get far far higher. No this is what
| we see at typical online newspapers from purely remnant
| advertising (not taking into account direct sales).
| redisman wrote:
| I think some merchandise or some other memento would've maybe
| worked? A t-shirt or a hat
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| So I did in the end apply to Google AdSense just to find out.
| Turns out the site didn't get approved because it didn't have
| enough content on it. So I think you would be hard pushed to
| monetise it quickly by going down the normal display ads route.
|
| I didn't mention in the post, but I had a couple of random ad
| offers, but they were for things that I didn't really agree
| with so didn't take up any of the offers.
| artembugara wrote:
| Thx.
|
| How is it possible that it's not you again who posted this on
| HN?
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| Ha. I came on here to post it myself this time. Turns out I
| was beaten to it.
| brianmorris10 wrote:
| Swag. Set up some shitty designs on one of those dropshipping
| sites and a storefront. Mugs, hoodies, etc.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yup, viral content and events are great for 'commemorative'
| swag, and there's plenty of companies that offer print-on-
| demand for things like that.
|
| One time I experienced a "trending topic" first (or
| second)hand; the app we were building accidentally sent a
| pair of test notifications to 2-3 million people, first the
| test message, then a second saying "zodat Hajo het ook
| gelooft" (so that Hajo (name) believes it too). That took the
| daytime internet by storm; news articles, radio segments,
| twitter trending topic, etc.
|
| I mainly followed the topic on Twitter, and before long there
| were adverts on there selling swag related to the trending
| topic. There's companies (or even bots?) scanning Twitter,
| making swag-on-demand for trending topics.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| And sell what exactly? It's not like he owns the copyright on
| the maritime map or on photographs of the ever given.
| redisman wrote:
| Commission some basic art about it?
| [deleted]
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| I appreciated the breakdown of steps involved in selling an NFT.
| Cool writeup.
| ehsankia wrote:
| It was especially funny right after admitting the hosting cost
| was 70$, but he then spent 70$ x 2 to get 200$ in unusable NFT
| credits.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Yeah, except for entirely glossing over the environmental
| aspect of that process.
| lancesells wrote:
| While I agree on there being environmental costs and NFTs
| seemingly terribly wasteful (since it's a digital file) have
| you considered the costs of what people buy in their day to
| day? I would love to see what the environmental comparison of
| an NBA NFT is compared to producing a souvenir basketball. My
| guess would be that it's lower and more renewable but I could
| be wrong.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > have you considered the costs of what people buy in their
| day to day?
|
| Yes. It's not relevant to this discussion. The author did
| not _need_ to mint an NFT and there was clearly no real
| demand for one.
|
| Creating an NBA NFT and then managing the ongoing bids will
| produce orders of magnitude more CO2 than selling a
| souvenir ball.
|
| Quartz recently published a good breakdown comparing
| selling and shipping a print vs selling an NFT
| https://qz.com/1987590/the-carbon-footprint-of-creating-
| and-...
| gjs278 wrote:
| yawn. stop wasting electrons with your posts.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > My guess would be that it's lower and more renewable but
| I could be wrong.
|
| That'll really boil down on a discussion of power sources
| (there were a few threads on this last week). Basically,
| how much power does it use, is this power to spare, what's
| the percentage of renewable energy etc..
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Yeah, that was actually really interesting to me.
| brabel wrote:
| To me, that just showed how ridiculously cumbersome and
| expensive it is to sell or buy stuff using cryptocurrencies.
| ldbooth wrote:
| 250k rickrolled. That is hilarious. Wish I checked the site
| during that period.
| devops000 wrote:
| Instead of wasting time with NFT you should have contacted
| Flexport for a partnership
| nickjj wrote:
| This reminds me of the toilet paper site from last year.
|
| From no traffic to 10+ million visitors and being featured on
| late night talk shows. It was 6 lines of JavaScript and took 20
| minutes to build but peaked at making $5,000 a day from ads.
|
| I ended up chatting with its creator on how he built and hosted
| it at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/35-determine-what-
| yo....
|
| But since then it looks like he transferred the site to someone
| else because now it's an e-commerce shop instead of a toilet
| paper calculator like it once was.
| camillomiller wrote:
| The main takeaway for me:
|
| > In my day job, we use Next.js for almost everything we build.
| It's a framework built on top of React that just strips out
| almost all the complexity of building fairly complicated
| websites. Obviously, this wasn't a complicated website, but I
| went with what I'm most familiar with.
|
| When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail :D
|
| Edit to say that I think it's an amazing little wholesome project
| and the author's very funny. Didn't want my comment to sound too
| harsh. :)
| _wldu wrote:
| Going with what you know is not always bad. It is the fastest
| way to get something done (if not the most efficient). And, he
| did not have time to learn something new.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Honest question for someone who is not a web developer: why
| _not_ use Next.js?
| deckard1 wrote:
| if you need a static site, there are a thousand generators
| out there much easier to use than React+nextjs. Some of these
| are easy enough that a non-developer can use and update.
|
| Using code to generate static sites is not new or
| particularly interesting. We have been caching PHP and Perl
| sites so that they are "static" since the dawn of the web.
| CDNs are really really old now. It feels like a new batch of
| developers don't know that caching is a thing and "static" is
| a hot buzzword.
| camillomiller wrote:
| A lot of developers are also so caught into framework
| thinking that they seem to forget that writing html5, with
| CSS and some lightweight JavaScript library if you need any
| is an absolutely elegant way to build a modern static
| website. It seems to me that too many web devs can't
| conceive anymore that a static website can be WRITTEN
| easily and fast and does NOT always have to be generated by
| a generator or a framework.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| From someone who codes for pleasure: there are simpler
| frameworks (my favorite is Quasar and Vue - I needed an
| afternoon to learn that coming with a crude HTML/CSS/JS basic
| knowledge)
| herbertl wrote:
| One part of me is a _huge_ proponent of learning, but the other
| part of me is learning (lol) that a huge part of earning
| involves figuring out what you already know or have invested
| energy /time/cost into learning, and finding ways to create
| value for others from it. This was a nice way of doing that,
| and this posts squeezes the extra value from that experience by
| sharing insights on going viral.
|
| In no way am I saying the only reason for learning is business
| --there's plenty of intrinsic value. But all that learning has
| to subsidized with something...
|
| From a business perspective, there's a good chance there's more
| than a handful of earning opportunities right under each of our
| very noses every day. The key is to find the ones that align
| with our strengths, personalities, skillsets, etc...
| DAE_JS_BAD wrote:
| Your comment doesn't sound harsh, it sounds stupid :)
| soneca wrote:
| Well, in my view this was actually a very fitting nail for the
| hammer he had.
| camillomiller wrote:
| I disagree, most of what the website does wouldn't
| necessarily need all the next.js superstructure. It's a very
| simple and modular page. That said, mine definitely wasn't a
| strong criticism.
|
| I also think the process explanation was very enjoyable.
| soneca wrote:
| In this sense, I see Nextjs more like a Swiss Army knife
| than a hammer. And the author (and the Vercel CEO tweets)
| explained that he used the exact right tools of it.
|
| In the end, _it was_ a static page that handled an
| incredible amount of traffic.
| redisman wrote:
| This is a news event related meme site. Of course you
| should use what you have muscle memory for so you can ship
| it in one day. Who cares if some other framework the author
| doesn't know would have done the job
| camillomiller wrote:
| This comment is gold. Big news: There's intelligent life
| outside frameworks.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I am an amateur dev and since I more or less learned Vue and
| the Quasar framework, every web site looks like a Vue&Quasar
| nail to me.
|
| It works - i can pop out sites that work in a mall amount of
| time. They will never be istheshipstillstuck.com-famous or
| cnn.com-loaded, or never be used in some countries where
| loading 10 MB of JS is a problem.
|
| they are used by me, on my 1000/400 Mbps connection, or by my
| children on a LAN.
|
| So having a hammer that works-sort-of-always-but-not-optimal is
| better than having a stupendous ultra-refined tool that is the
| exact fit for the work - but requires 100 hours to learn and
| 430 pages of docs translated by Google from Swahili to French.
| camillomiller wrote:
| This is the point. Why do you all think just in damn
| frameworks!? There's a thing called HTML5+CSS+JS. You could
| have built that static page in no time with that, that's my
| surprisingly misunderstood point here.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| quasar create hello
|
| cd hello
|
| quasar dev
|
| - I have a page and a dev server
|
| After adding a few lines I have the components all in the
| right place.
|
| quasar build
|
| - I have my static page
|
| One line changed, I have a PWA
|
| I will not do a PhD in development, I need to have simple
| reactive apps quickly.
|
| Of course I could have use HTML/CSS/JS and write everything
| from scratch (been there, done that). Of course they will
| load 2 x faster, so I will not have to wait the 200 ms I do
| now.
|
| Development today is so much easier. When I started 30
| years ago it was truly an adventure. Today my children are
| coding simple stuff after one afternoon of showing them.
|
| So yay to the frameworks, modules and others things that
| help people who just wish to build something fast.
|
| Have you ever bought furniture or do you start by taking
| your axe and visiting the nearest forest?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There's a thing called HTML5+CSS+JS. You could have built
| that static page
|
| The web platform itself is a framework that consumes static
| HTML and CSS and calls into your JS. Preferring a higher-
| level framework for web apps when that is available is no
| different than preferring a higher level language even
| though ASM is available for local apps.
| F_J_H wrote:
| Thank goodness for creative people who think of new and
| ingenious ways to use tools differently than originally
| intended. It's the heart of innovation.
| cyberlab wrote:
| > A single-purpose website
|
| The more fashionable term is Single Serving Site[0], and is a
| phrase originally coined by Jason Kottke.
|
| You can find more of these types of sites here:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-serving_site
| pjmorris wrote:
| I first saw 'single serving friend' in Fight Club [0], do you
| think the idea was lifted from there?
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1iQp8g9SQo
| kamel3d wrote:
| in 2016 I made a single serving website it's only purpose is
| to copy emojis to your clipboard, it is kinda popular now it
| gets 6K users a day but moste of the visits are from Russia
| so it is a bit hard to monetise www.emojilo.com
| StavrosK wrote:
| I have needed that often, thanks for making an easy site!
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Windows + ; is the shortcut you want if you're on
| Windows.
| cyberlab wrote:
| Kottke's article[0] is in 2008, after Fight Club's release in
| 1999, so you may be right, he probably lifted it from Fight
| Club. You can always email him to confirm!
|
| [0] https://kottke.org/08/02/single-serving-sites
| meibo wrote:
| I really don't want to sound elitist, but building something like
| this with a big JS framework and immediately jumping to monetize
| it?(NFTs are gross and undermine any message or intention, even
| just to be "funny")
|
| This could have been a 20kb html page on a CDN or on GitHub. But
| I don't work in web dev so maybe my mind just doesn't go to these
| lengths immediately.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| In the OP he explains he used next.js cause he was familiar
| with it so could quickly implement it, and he made like maybe
| $300 from the whole thing thing, only like $40 from the NFT the
| rest from affiliate links (not enough to cover the time he
| spent on it at any reasonable rate were you working for someone
| else; would have been $70 less if his hosting company hadn't
| given him an unexpected freebie).
|
| In the OP he comes off pretty well, just a guy looking to
| experiment and do something fun, see what happened, try
| different things. (If he had been serious about revenue
| generation and prepared, I am pretty sure he could have made a
| lot more money from this with that many impressions; that
| wasn't his focus).
|
| You can experiment and do something fun irresponsibly
| (trolling) or responsibly (caring about the user experience and
| accuracy, not trying to rip anyone off), it sounds like he did
| it pretty responsibly. (I guess the rickroll is a bit grey
| area!) I also appreciate him sharing the details transparently.
| Assuming his story in the OP is truthful, which I think it
| probably is.
|
| [I think NFT's are really dumb, I think it was kind of a funny
| joke to have an NFT there, and interesting to see his report-
| back about the process of issuing an NFT. There aren't a lot of
| people being transparent about their experience with NFTs!]
| isakkeyten wrote:
| This is actually a well done web app in my opinion. You can
| disable javascript and the app loads just fine. JS is used as a
| progressive enhancement to hydrate. Probably uses something
| like NextJS in the background. The HTML with inlined critical
| styles load in ~40ms on my internet. Sure it could be "better"
| in terms of TTI from the JS side but at what cost?
| antoinec wrote:
| Looks like he wanted to experiment different things, which
| becomes a lot more interesting when thousands of people are
| coming to your app. And he knew it was only going to be the
| case for a limited amount of time, so enjoying as much as
| possible having an audience was probably the best thing to do!
| srmarm wrote:
| It's a bit of a time limited joke and not a business. If it was
| done as a business and ad heavy it wouldn't be shared so much.
|
| Seems to me the best monetisation he could do is selling himself.
| Even a couple hours work off the back of it would have been
| beating any ad's etc.
|
| I had a minor web hit in the 90s, tried to do affiliate links etc
| but nothing really worked but I did get a little bit of work from
| it that has been indirectly the launch pad for a few side
| projects. None made me rich but they've all been a step forward.
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