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Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

I don’t usually like to toot my own horn, but I make $600k/year off a plain HTML static site that isn’t even coded well, in-line CSS, many pages not responsive, broken links, etc.

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I have a site like this as well and it makes about a paltry $40k on a good year. I mostly got lucky because I had some niche domain knowledge for a specific industry that was lacking a web product. I wasted money trying to grow it for some time but I've come to accept even at it's full potential it would probably only make maybe double of what it does now at max. I hope someday though i'll stumble across a $600k a year opportunity.

$40k/year is admirable. Mine was at that level for many years than all of a sudden shot up in google rankings a few years ago.

I doubt there will be an "all of a sudden" event for my industry, if anything it's probably on a decline.

You wrote in another comment that it is an "information rich" site. Has the absence of a search feature ever been a problem for you? Or did run into any issues that could have been easily solved with something like a WordPress plugin (if the site wasn't static, of course).

I'm asking because these are the things that bug me when it comes to this "static all day, every day" trend.

it's not search intensive web site. I actually use Google Search on the site and it works pretty well.

Ah, interesting! Thanks for your answer.

What site is that? :)

I knew someone would ask. Sorry but I’m not gonna reveal it, don’t want competition.

I will say it’s been online for over a decade, information rich, with affiliate lead generation as the main source of income.

Hah! But great work otherwise then. But did it start out as a hobby, or was it entirely planned as a business?

It was planned as a business from the start. I was running a different site that started as a hobby, and one of the affiliate links was performing well even though it wasn’t highly targeted to the audience. I knew there was a biz opportunity there.

If it's the Milliondollarhomepage.com then it isn't quite living up to its legacy ;)

Actually, the founder of that site started calm.com - which is valued at over $1 billion now. Not too shabby

Why on Earth would you tell anyone here that?

I'm actually quite amazed at most of the Show HN posts with commercial products. Unless you are actually aiming towards developer or software shop dollars the risk/reward seems incredibly off kilter.

exactly, this is a forum full of technically minded entrepreneurs, many of whom are looking for ideas.

Most likely an adult or gambling site.

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