Hacker News Reader

Comment by t0mislav | Hacker News Reader

One small geography site, bringing "only" like 600-700$ a year, but it is passive. https://random.country/ I made few more similiar sites, but they all failed.

View on HN

FYI, you’ve got encoding problems. When I was told about the “Aland Islands” (no accent on the A, but I’ll forgive that as a content error rather than an encoding error), the Wikipedia excerpt spoke of “The Ã…land Islands” while the actual Wikipedia article had “The Åland Islands”.

Thanks. I noticed that but tbth I was lazy to fix it as I needed to work on other things. But it will be fixed.

Can I ask how you bring in site visitors? For such a niche site, I imagine you didn't do any advertising-- or did you do some based on search keywords on Google?

I have a lot of ideas for small interesting websites like this, but I've no clue how to popularize them at all. Maybe a Show HN or something, but that seems like a short burst if the site is more of a novelty.

Correct, there was no advertising. At first, It was not even plan to make money from this site. It was to learn few new things.

In first year, I maybe leaved link on one or two subreddits, with not too many subscribers. I had little bit of traffic from reddit.

I had this url also in signature in 2 discussion boards, but boards were in Croatian language. So only little bit of traffic from there.

Then after some time I got better Google ranking. (there was no too much similiar sites there, so it was easy to get better ranking).

Once someone on 4chan or similair chan site posted link.

Basically, it has grown without marketing/advertising. But still, it is small site.

Just people searching for "random country"?

Little bit of "random country", "random place", "random country generator" and few more similiar phrases.

Nice. Did the domain cost you too much ?

.country domain is something like 20 to 30$ a year I think. It was free domain when I searched for it.

like the simplicity and ux. what is the business model?

There was no business model. It was just to learn code few years back. Then after a year I noticed there is some traffic on site. So I put ads there, and that is basically everything.

thanks for the reply. didn't see the ads (blocker).

might also work to feature some amazon products (books, maps, globes, …).

i wonder how to drive more traffic. maybe a social (media) aspect like inviting friends/posting scores.

From ads?

Yes. Only ads.

To be honest, I don't even know how to montize such small and simple site. This is not service where you return every day, or every few days. It's like you use this site for a minute, two, than you forget about it.

What about a newsletter? Like random country/city facts emailed daily/weekly? Keeps traffic and interest in your brand more consistent and eventually you can funnel it into a bigger project?

I imagine it would do well with the trivia crowd

Reply on news.ycombinator.com