Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon_builder | Hacker News Reader

In august I made about $122,000 from display ads, mostly Adsense. 5-10% of that is spent on stuff like server space and freelance employees. I can imagine that this will not be taken seriously due to lack of details, but for anyone interested, I'm open to answering non-specific questions.

Edit: I see 'from what' is also the question; I have a bunch of entertainment related sites.

View on HN

Few questions, if you dont mind :)

1. How long did it take to reach this level of income?

2. What is the total monthly traffic that generates 122k?

3. How much time does it take to manage the whole thing in its present state?

1) 6 years

2) 8 million monthly uniques

3) Hard to say. I can take a month off and it'll probably go fine. If it crashes, I'm on it 24/7 (if I care for my wallet). I do work on it full time, but that's working on growth as well as managing the present state. I try to outsource as many chores and secondary tasks as possible, leaving the multi-disciplinary work for me.

Good job you've done there! Thanks for the info and good luck!)

Do you have any tips for squeezing the most out of adsense? Ad positioning, types, quantity, obtrusiveness?

Nothing that's not obvious.

Surely, there are methods to squeeze more revenue out of Adsense, or any display ad for that matter, but you'll risk being banned. So that's not worth it, especially when you get bigger.

I do recommend trying out different ad networks and having them compete with each other and with adsense in an ad server such as OpenX or DFP.

Great. Thanks for that.

- So is it niche marketing?

- Are all your websites revolving around the same niche?

- How many do you deploy for particular keyword and its long-tail keyword?

- How many years/months you spent on keyword research? I mean when did you eventually ended up on this niche?

- All your income is just Adsense? or Affiliate marketing too?

- All yours websites are ranked #1 on SERP or few just somehwere on page #1?

- Is your traffic source completely organic?

- How much of black hat SEO involved?

1) Depends on what you call a niche.

2) Yes.

3) How many what? Links?

4) I started out in the niche without knowing any SEO at all. Started building a product and built a lot of links for traffic. The authority and product I built then were the fundament for everything else. Not annoying my users, and building a strong site were always very important, as opposed to doing short-term black hat stuff while forgetting about content. I continually do keyword research; always keep my eyes open.

5) Not just Adsense, some other ad networks as well. All display ads though.

6) Depends. There are many keywords, some rank #1, some page #1, some don't rank at all. Depends on the quality of the content as well, I continually work on that.

7) For this project, yes. I've done PPC on other projects, but it doesn't seem to be profitable so far for this one.

8) Depends on what you call black hat. I've never spammed anything. Have bought a link here and there in the past, but I do have a huge amount of natural links as well. I guess that for industry standards, I'm pretty clean.

What's your backup revenue plan in event of an adsense ban?

None, it would be disastrous.

I would probably work with other ad networks, but that wouldn't be cost effective to monetize my long tail of smaller sites. It would lead to a significant, if not huge, drop in revenue.

You do get in personal contact with people at Google starting at some level of revenue though. So if it ever happened, I guess I would see it coming in some way.

google doesn't care, the company that I work for does around 15x your monthly revenue and was banned from adsense and getting in contact with google was impossible, as was finding a resolution (other than "re-apply in 6 months").

I assume you can't share what company that is?

Or the market you were operating in?

I can't imagine that a publisher doing 25 million of revenue per year couldn't get in touch with anyone at Google.

Why wouldn't other ad networks be as effective as Google Adsense?

What makes Adsense unique?

Their huge reach. There's no network with the same amount of advertisers and publishers. Especially with smaller sites, they're the easiest way to monetize, and sometimes to only way at all.

I would love to hear some more on this if you don't mind. If you are making that kind of money, then our company is clearly doing something horribly wrong :)

You're not doing something wrong per se. I started out at the right time in the right niche, that helped me get away with a lot. I started out when in high school, when I had no costs of living, which is a great way to learn risk-free. As a result I now do 'marketing' as well as technical stuff, which keeps margins high, and gives me breadth in all those fields, which, I think, hugely contributes to my success. But mostly it's a matter of right place, right time...

Do you have a strategy of how you built up your network? I'm really curious about how you started, and how you'd pick the right idea to pursue.

Copycatted a concept, added my own twist. Got lucky and got into a great niche without much competition. Grew from there.

How many sites did you mention? And how much unique visitor do you have in total?

A few dozen sites, with a couple doing about 80% of revenue. About 8 million uniques.

where do you find good freelance employees? Do you have many writers under your wing?

Freelancer marketplaces. You'll find a good one for every 50 crappy ones.

Are you in the sfw or nsfw biz?

SFW.

wow, congrats. I'm sure a lot of hard work and energy went into this over the years!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com