Golden Mountains startups, or do not live for free, even if called himself 'free'
This topic is an invitation to the discussion. At the end I promise a very useful thing.
Recently, more and more appears free and open. It’s all clear when Google makes a great tool that could make a lot of money ( SketchUp ) - free - everyone understands that a company already makes a lot of money and it’s more important to get more users. Although there is a paid version. However, more and more of us are coming up with new ideas, such as YubNub (the service is not mine), and the like, which will make life easier for users. Make - a day or two, debug a week or ten, bring to the mind of users - a year.
However, the question arises - to spend time on the development of the service - is to lose money. Elementary - the server, people, personal time - takes all the money. Previously, this problem could be solved by advertising ...
')
But lately, especially for Russia, advertising has become less and less effective. If in 2005 (it seems) a year, I could receive $ 75 eCPM with AdSense , now on the same sites - $ 10-20, which is generally sad. Google and many others are eating away from 50% of the income and apparently this figure is only growing with their appetites, because we stop thinking .
We were given too many almost ready-made solutions - “stick in AdSense and everything is ready,” “there is no traffic — optimization is needed”, “a startup is waiting for the start and investor angels” and similar slogans are firmly entrenched in the brain. We stopped thinking that there were other ways to make money, such as the owner of Million Dollar Homepage or Firefox .
For some reason, now if a person talks about the fact that he is making his “startup” I immediately have a feeling that this is hardly something worthwhile, because usually this word is followed by the words “venture capitalists”.
[Almost_ads otmazalsya = "without this paragraph, many subsequent ones will be meaningless"]
Why am I talking about this? I have my own “projects” and about one, opened a year ago , they even wrote serious publications, such as TechCrunch (they called me “ Semantic SEO project ” :)), KillerStartups and Heise.de (called “ anonymous Russian programmer ”; heise.de - this is the type of German Slashdot - they put me a server at a time - uptime was 50-70). A fire in the data center was assigned a class of 5, after which the real firefighters arrived and said that it was not a fire, but the hard drive was blinking. Memcached saved. Much of this in the story section on my blog .
After publication, I was offered to find venture capital. I refused. There are many reasons, but one of the main ones - well, I will spend one hundred thousand or one million dollars, and then what? If the project does not bring at least $ 1.01 per $ 1.00 spent - you at least give him one hundred million - he will spend it all.
[/ almost_ads]
If you thought about buns, I suggest to have a bite, because the end of my grafomania is not soon. :)
Traveling across the expanses of the Internet, in fact, I thought about the service that I have been using since I forgot when — delicious.com (formerly del.icio.us - “delicious” in English, otherwise they blame me for not everyone knows English ). Sitting on it, I thought about the fact that there is no advertising. No, seriously, there was no advertising anywhere. Later, when Yahoo bought it, with the advent of the new design, the Yahoo AD Network appeared on the search, however, it may need more Yahoo than “tasty”.
Sobsno was born a logical question. And where is the money "delicious" was taken to the server to the world-famous service? On programmers, traffic? What earned?
That my project (about which I wrote above) on WebSiteOutlook was estimated at $ 28,000 and said that he earns $ 38 daily. I will reveal a big secret. Its profitability is MINUS $ 5.22 per day (price of a server with unlimited traffic)
Actually not quite guess. It is clear that the project is unprofitable (although several thousand people go there a day). And it makes no sense that I take a million (or how much do they give there now?) And spend it, or from "investors" in Russia, that Moroz correctly translated into Russian as a "master" - no sense. At least ten thousand people are still a minus in balance at the end of the month.
Did I try to make money on it? And then. So, we are finally getting closer to what it was all about.
As I said before, we stop thinking (see the link above), and the first thing I do is slap AdSense. Helped? Nifiga The pages of the project are huge and advertising is simply lost, and considering that the main audience is webmasters who have long been blind to AdSense, it is clear that half a cent has been falling in a day.
I put Google Custom Search - well, $ 30 a month with almost a hundred thousand visitors - that’s hard. :)
It was then that I began to show a desire to start thinking. Tired of paying for the server every month for free, but I don’t want to wait for the “venture”.
So, I propose to play the game. I will tell the thoughts that came to my mind during this time and worked or not, and you offer yours, which can monetize non-standard “free (as in beer)” (free) services. And all that you offer interesting - I will add to the list below.
Go. On the right we think - where to take traffic, on the left - we think where to get money.
Below is a form for comments - we write ideas, stories and generalizations, conclusions in it.
In order for God forbid no more to read so many letters - we spoil karma in the profile. :)
1. AdSense and the like are all clear :) You wait a month, Google’s appetites for income cuts grow proportionally to investors' appetites, then run with a check. Or in the district post office with grandmothers who receive a transfer of 54 rubles and 12 kopecks, somewhere in Ust-Nesostoyisk receive your $ 1000 earned per year - the whole city will know about you tomorrow. In general, Google is trying to give great ideas.
[Disclaimer: Ust-Nesubodysk - a fictional city, any coincidence by chance, people accidentally living in this city - please leave it]
2. UmaxLogin (search for you to help, and then the big temptation to put a ref-link :)) - for me it became a temporary exit for long pages. The cached result of the XML feed can be shown on the same page at least ten times and in any size. We get 10 links, repeat them 5 times - that's 50 blocks for a long page (adsense, even 3 blocks, just lost). Result: 25% CTR on Rare News, $ 5-7, payment on the card twice a month. Cons - Russian traffic goes to the forest. :)
Unfortunately, this service is often associated with doorwayers, which is bad, because the service itself only gives advertising - that it allows itself to be used like this - well, this is their right, but this does not mean that you should not use it on normal sites, especially considering that no hemorrhoids with checks and not wait a month for money.
3. Direct advertising sales . For me - too many nuances + see the trail. the point is about “convincing”, however, those who sell advertising directly say that it is an order of magnitude more profitable than selling through AdSense. A good example: HabraHabr - advertising from above, I think, is sold directly, and not through Adsense / Yandex.Direct :)
4. I tried to suggest people sponsor words. For example, there is the word “habr”, buy it for $ 9.95 per year and it will link to it from all thousands of pages. It was harder to sell than to say. For three days, no one bought anything (you need to convince people), but as an idea, it’s worth considering.
Alternative names: sponsoring categories, paid link, selling links for only $ 50 or more per piece - thematic, visible, and it is for people to switch.
5. The site with payment by month goes beyond the concept of “called 'free'”. A good example is last.fm - $ 3 / month for additional services.
6. Selling links in bulk ( sape.ru and similar). Risky, cheap. But the money immediately.
So, there is a mass of free services, free programs, etc., some of which do not let me know how they earn money, some I understand, but all the rest ... prompt Habravchane.
1. Firefox is monetized through the search box - something like Google Custom Search. Cons - Google refuses to all, except for the large ones, in integrating the search field into their programs. As far as I heard, Ubuntu was denied this. Are there other search providers?
2. Damn Small Linux has a guide on how they are monetized. Namely - AdSense / advertising on the site, "create a community and it will sit and sometimes even click on advertising." But considering some strange things on their site, it doesn't seem to be very profitable.
n0xi0uzz : By the way, here is the translation of the Guide to profit from free and open projects , which was written by the author DamnSmallLinux. There it is not only about AdSense and the community.
3. Closed functionality - an example of Google SketchUp , where the paid version can do more than the free one.
4. Donations or give a ruble. I read somewhere about a person whose prog was downloaded by 20,000 people and had a donation button. Well says that ONE beer scored.
For my service (described above), I was offered to give $ 100 in donations (a person recruited words from my service recommended for his site, wrote articles on them - traffic lifted three times from a rather considerable level), but unfortunately, PayPal considers us Russians, swindlers, and did not let him transfer money to me, although I myself refused. But the idea - as an idea - is worth considering. Any ideas on donations?
Your ideas for monetization free software?
5. DYPA : Basic earnings from open-source - technical support (see extjs license) / user support (any Linux distr)
5a. kibizoidus : Plus dokuruchivanie " by request " of new features, etc. etc., because no one will do this to you better than the developer himself; Developing a turnkey solution for an order-based solution (Do you think that Red Hat just kills up its Enterprise Linux ?)
5b. ryzhik : (strongly rephrased) “Do you want this new functionality - let's donate - give people a list of what you can complete and accept donations to change the priority of something on this list”
5b1. plus the idea of almaz , that donations in Russia are best sms ' kami.
6. unikum : Everyone knows and hates pop-ups . (still, some semi-large ones are monetized even so — note)
7. trix : On the open software, they still often earn money through paid documentation . (example - Erlang - there is scattered documentation on the language, but the whole book is a paid one).
1. Web developers include “Powered by [link]”, which gives them a high position in search. And there is already Adsense / Affiliate, etc. (see “weird stuff” from DSL above). Here we put the counters and widgets that can be inserted into your page - we all know that they often have a link :)
Well, about advertising I will not repeat - see free / open source
2. Google Search for sites - brings little + all the same problems (checks, delay or grandmothers in the mail and local popularity as earning well - in Moscow time it can be nothing, but here are the regions ....)
3. Found on the Internet : find out what your users can compete in and make them pay for it (in the article we are talking about paid spouting from the chat channel), but other examples immediately come to mind: take the place of a leader on a dating site, raise a collective blog. And this implies another thing that I forgot.
4. Buying " features " inaccessible to others - VIP-status on dating sites, invisibility on odnoklassniki (or on some other network, forgot), cool armor in the MMORPG. Also see idea 5b in “free software”, it will also fit here.
5. DPihto : Another way to earn money is to sell the intranet versions of the favorite free-service to corporate clients.
6. DPihto : It is still strange that no one remembered about the sale of paraphernalia. A good option is personalized attributes , reflecting the activity of a particular user (cloud of his tags, his Nickname, ID, skills, karmapoints, etc.)
7. DPihto : Another missed, I think, source of finance is grants . Venture capital investments imply the creation of a business, while grants are allocated for thematic developments.
8. roden : user consultation using paid phone numbers (when the caller pays)
9. crazywebdev : sms-voting (give people a controversial topic and a way to vote for one of the options -prm. My)
10. TedBeer : Temporary accounts - a full-featured service is provided free of charge, say, for half a year / year. [similar to “Shareware / trialware”]
Separately: cyberwaste : Traffic monetization of [Vkontakte] ... profits are made by the personnel division “Professional contacts”, which is engaged in the recruitment of personnel among the multimillion audience of the network.
And now tell me the Habra people ... on what they earn:
Jokes in italics.
... DropBox - sells files passwords.txt and bank_accounts.txt to Panama bankstreamists ?
... YubNub ( wrote earlier ) - is going to compete with MSDOS ?
... cloudcache - these I really fear - free memcached ?? What are they thinking ??
... any other service where there is no advertising and payment?
Useful thought from mylh : A successful Internet project and a successful business are two completely different things. A project can have mega popularity, fame and attendance and at the same time be unprofitable - this is obvious and exposed to many examples: Twitter, Youtube, odnoklassniki, vkontakte. Are these successful projects? Of course. Are they profitable? Not. Live at the expense of investors.
1. Almost black referral spam method . When my bot comes to someone, he leaves Referral, but [!] This page shows his site from an unusual point of view (for a long time to explain). In general, it brings potential benefit to this person + there is a link to him, so I (and many readers of my blog) thought it was interesting - this is something about them!
I even once refused this method, but I was forced to return positive feedback. Plus it gave see (2.)
Important! If you use this method - give people a way to lock your bot ( example ) via robots.txt or .htaccess, because it can annoy. And in general it is good practice, and in Python it is done in a couple of lines.
Result: first, this traffic gave about 100% of visitors, now about 20%. With a million bypassed domains - a thousand people. In the base of 72 million (truth of the trash ....) The bot takes 55 days to go around the Web (its meaning is not in the referral links, but in the indexing of the web, and this is processing of html, etc. - quite a long time, Ref. Links appeared only as an addition to the bot)
2. Publication in cool industry publications : TechCrunch and the like.
Frankly, this is obvious, but for some reason he did not reach it. One of the people who came to my ref-spam project wrote an article and sent it to Erick Schonfield (someone very high in TechCranch), and Eric published his article (link above), inserting that person’s article into the center and even a link to his site. Result: 10,000 transitions . That person also received about a hundred clicks to his site simply for describing my project. Then we talked with Eric and he said that such publications often publish what readers send them. So - write, send to TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb , (Google Trends section " also visited " to help you) - publish and you will be stunned by how many people there are able to move in a minute :)
Cascade effect : many other editions, including KillerStartups and many small blogs. After that, heise.de connected - they gave almost 30,000 transitions of Germans and I worked for three days to clean the site (everything is there without registration).
3. StumbleUpon - probably the most useless traffic. None of the thousands who have transferred at all did nothing on the site. Don't even bother.
4. I wrote a review about the rare new CouchDB database system. This was noticed by one of the authors of CouchDB, Jan Lehnardt, and put a link to my project and blog (I did not send it anywhere, just very few materials on the word “couchdb”).
Generalization - write about rare new things . (How to find them? [I need the Spoiler button to remove pieces under it] I have one project [it is very experimental and looks like a big dump , but I’m working on it] - it can help to find Rare News, so called 70,000 news sources (RSS is not used) - you can try, for example, news for today on Web 2.0 and similar topics - there is a wide categorization - news about Iraq will include all the news that the USA has invaded :) the algorithm is being worked out).
5. Reddit picked up the news too, and I also rewrote the “Rare News” engine and found that Django flows in memory while parallelizing (at my load of 70,000 sources it is cruel - gig per minute). To which I was very offended and wrote a rather angry post, but Reddit readers were not less offended, they said that I couldn’t write programs and use the tools and came up with a couple of thousand commentators who said that Django was not leaking. I used only ORM from Django , not all.
To summarize: when we find something unusual in well-known things, this raises a fuss. Learning to notice - what unusual we found.
6. At this point, I already tested (good Django promotes) Postgres vs MyISAM vs InnoDB and discovered the slowness of PostgreSQL for my purposes . What he wrote about. The people at reddit considered it a provocation and again put a link. A thousand more people (and reproaches that I don’t know how to customize Postgres). As a result - kamenty on the blog are closed - tired of reading holivary. Of course, working as a troll wasn’t my desire, as well as insulting PostgreSQL (only to show that for me and my goal it didn’t work), but ...
To summarize: provocations work , even if you were not going to do them.
And now we are playing ... I suggest to write your ideas and stories, thoughts in kamenta - how traffic was obtained and it is desirable to summarize, suggest how it could be used by other people. And I will add them to the topic as far as useful. You can also write services that are not clear how to monetize - we will look for how they did it.
WARNING: it's not about what my projects do to pay off - I will find the very way sooner or later, let's get NEW ideas that can help other people.
Yoi Haji
view from Habra
Recently, more and more appears free and open. It’s all clear when Google makes a great tool that could make a lot of money ( SketchUp ) - free - everyone understands that a company already makes a lot of money and it’s more important to get more users. Although there is a paid version. However, more and more of us are coming up with new ideas, such as YubNub (the service is not mine), and the like, which will make life easier for users. Make - a day or two, debug a week or ten, bring to the mind of users - a year.
However, the question arises - to spend time on the development of the service - is to lose money. Elementary - the server, people, personal time - takes all the money. Previously, this problem could be solved by advertising ...
')
But lately, especially for Russia, advertising has become less and less effective. If in 2005 (it seems) a year, I could receive $ 75 eCPM with AdSense , now on the same sites - $ 10-20, which is generally sad. Google and many others are eating away from 50% of the income and apparently this figure is only growing with their appetites, because we stop thinking .
We were given too many almost ready-made solutions - “stick in AdSense and everything is ready,” “there is no traffic — optimization is needed”, “a startup is waiting for the start and investor angels” and similar slogans are firmly entrenched in the brain. We stopped thinking that there were other ways to make money, such as the owner of Million Dollar Homepage or Firefox .
Gold for startups
For some reason, now if a person talks about the fact that he is making his “startup” I immediately have a feeling that this is hardly something worthwhile, because usually this word is followed by the words “venture capitalists”.
[Almost_ads otmazalsya = "without this paragraph, many subsequent ones will be meaningless"]
Why am I talking about this? I have my own “projects” and about one, opened a year ago , they even wrote serious publications, such as TechCrunch (they called me “ Semantic SEO project ” :)), KillerStartups and Heise.de (called “ anonymous Russian programmer ”; heise.de - this is the type of German Slashdot - they put me a server at a time - uptime was 50-70). A fire in the data center was assigned a class of 5, after which the real firefighters arrived and said that it was not a fire, but the hard drive was blinking. Memcached saved. Much of this in the story section on my blog .
After publication, I was offered to find venture capital. I refused. There are many reasons, but one of the main ones - well, I will spend one hundred thousand or one million dollars, and then what? If the project does not bring at least $ 1.01 per $ 1.00 spent - you at least give him one hundred million - he will spend it all.
[/ almost_ads]
“Tasty” projects
If you thought about buns, I suggest to have a bite, because the end of my grafomania is not soon. :)
Traveling across the expanses of the Internet, in fact, I thought about the service that I have been using since I forgot when — delicious.com (formerly del.icio.us - “delicious” in English, otherwise they blame me for not everyone knows English ). Sitting on it, I thought about the fact that there is no advertising. No, seriously, there was no advertising anywhere. Later, when Yahoo bought it, with the advent of the new design, the Yahoo AD Network appeared on the search, however, it may need more Yahoo than “tasty”.
Where's the money?
Sobsno was born a logical question. And where is the money "delicious" was taken to the server to the world-famous service? On programmers, traffic? What earned?
That my project (about which I wrote above) on WebSiteOutlook was estimated at $ 28,000 and said that he earns $ 38 daily. I will reveal a big secret. Its profitability is MINUS $ 5.22 per day (price of a server with unlimited traffic)
Now guess why I abandoned the search for "venture capital"?
Actually not quite guess. It is clear that the project is unprofitable (although several thousand people go there a day). And it makes no sense that I take a million (or how much do they give there now?) And spend it, or from "investors" in Russia, that Moroz correctly translated into Russian as a "master" - no sense. At least ten thousand people are still a minus in balance at the end of the month.
Did I try to make money on it? And then. So, we are finally getting closer to what it was all about.
Let's play?
As I said before, we stop thinking (see the link above), and the first thing I do is slap AdSense. Helped? Nifiga The pages of the project are huge and advertising is simply lost, and considering that the main audience is webmasters who have long been blind to AdSense, it is clear that half a cent has been falling in a day.
I put Google Custom Search - well, $ 30 a month with almost a hundred thousand visitors - that’s hard. :)
It was then that I began to show a desire to start thinking. Tired of paying for the server every month for free, but I don’t want to wait for the “venture”.
So, I propose to play the game. I will tell the thoughts that came to my mind during this time and worked or not, and you offer yours, which can monetize non-standard “free (as in beer)” (free) services. And all that you offer interesting - I will add to the list below.
Go. On the right we think - where to take traffic, on the left - we think where to get money.
Below is a form for comments - we write ideas, stories and generalizations, conclusions in it.
In order for God forbid no more to read so many letters - we spoil karma in the profile. :)
Monetized
1. AdSense and the like are all clear :) You wait a month, Google’s appetites for income cuts grow proportionally to investors' appetites, then run with a check. Or in the district post office with grandmothers who receive a transfer of 54 rubles and 12 kopecks, somewhere in Ust-Nesostoyisk receive your $ 1000 earned per year - the whole city will know about you tomorrow. In general, Google is trying to give great ideas.
[Disclaimer: Ust-Nesubodysk - a fictional city, any coincidence by chance, people accidentally living in this city - please leave it]
2. UmaxLogin (search for you to help, and then the big temptation to put a ref-link :)) - for me it became a temporary exit for long pages. The cached result of the XML feed can be shown on the same page at least ten times and in any size. We get 10 links, repeat them 5 times - that's 50 blocks for a long page (adsense, even 3 blocks, just lost). Result: 25% CTR on Rare News, $ 5-7, payment on the card twice a month. Cons - Russian traffic goes to the forest. :)
Unfortunately, this service is often associated with doorwayers, which is bad, because the service itself only gives advertising - that it allows itself to be used like this - well, this is their right, but this does not mean that you should not use it on normal sites, especially considering that no hemorrhoids with checks and not wait a month for money.
3. Direct advertising sales . For me - too many nuances + see the trail. the point is about “convincing”, however, those who sell advertising directly say that it is an order of magnitude more profitable than selling through AdSense. A good example: HabraHabr - advertising from above, I think, is sold directly, and not through Adsense / Yandex.Direct :)
4. I tried to suggest people sponsor words. For example, there is the word “habr”, buy it for $ 9.95 per year and it will link to it from all thousands of pages. It was harder to sell than to say. For three days, no one bought anything (you need to convince people), but as an idea, it’s worth considering.
Alternative names: sponsoring categories, paid link, selling links for only $ 50 or more per piece - thematic, visible, and it is for people to switch.
5. The site with payment by month goes beyond the concept of “called 'free'”. A good example is last.fm - $ 3 / month for additional services.
6. Selling links in bulk ( sape.ru and similar). Risky, cheap. But the money immediately.
And now the new songs about the main thing in Web 2.0 - how free services are monetized and how they live free.
So, there is a mass of free services, free programs, etc., some of which do not let me know how they earn money, some I understand, but all the rest ... prompt Habravchane.
Free / Open Source software
1. Firefox is monetized through the search box - something like Google Custom Search. Cons - Google refuses to all, except for the large ones, in integrating the search field into their programs. As far as I heard, Ubuntu was denied this. Are there other search providers?
2. Damn Small Linux has a guide on how they are monetized. Namely - AdSense / advertising on the site, "create a community and it will sit and sometimes even click on advertising." But considering some strange things on their site, it doesn't seem to be very profitable.
n0xi0uzz : By the way, here is the translation of the Guide to profit from free and open projects , which was written by the author DamnSmallLinux. There it is not only about AdSense and the community.
3. Closed functionality - an example of Google SketchUp , where the paid version can do more than the free one.
4. Donations or give a ruble. I read somewhere about a person whose prog was downloaded by 20,000 people and had a donation button. Well says that ONE beer scored.
For my service (described above), I was offered to give $ 100 in donations (a person recruited words from my service recommended for his site, wrote articles on them - traffic lifted three times from a rather considerable level), but unfortunately, PayPal considers us Russians, swindlers, and did not let him transfer money to me, although I myself refused. But the idea - as an idea - is worth considering. Any ideas on donations?
Your ideas for monetization free software?
5. DYPA : Basic earnings from open-source - technical support (see extjs license) / user support (any Linux distr)
5a. kibizoidus : Plus dokuruchivanie " by request " of new features, etc. etc., because no one will do this to you better than the developer himself; Developing a turnkey solution for an order-based solution (Do you think that Red Hat just kills up its Enterprise Linux ?)
5b. ryzhik : (strongly rephrased) “Do you want this new functionality - let's donate - give people a list of what you can complete and accept donations to change the priority of something on this list”
5b1. plus the idea of almaz , that donations in Russia are best sms ' kami.
6. unikum : Everyone knows and hates pop-ups . (still, some semi-large ones are monetized even so — note)
7. trix : On the open software, they still often earn money through paid documentation . (example - Erlang - there is scattered documentation on the language, but the whole book is a paid one).
Free Services
1. Web developers include “Powered by [link]”, which gives them a high position in search. And there is already Adsense / Affiliate, etc. (see “weird stuff” from DSL above). Here we put the counters and widgets that can be inserted into your page - we all know that they often have a link :)
Well, about advertising I will not repeat - see free / open source
2. Google Search for sites - brings little + all the same problems (checks, delay or grandmothers in the mail and local popularity as earning well - in Moscow time it can be nothing, but here are the regions ....)
3. Found on the Internet : find out what your users can compete in and make them pay for it (in the article we are talking about paid spouting from the chat channel), but other examples immediately come to mind: take the place of a leader on a dating site, raise a collective blog. And this implies another thing that I forgot.
4. Buying " features " inaccessible to others - VIP-status on dating sites, invisibility on odnoklassniki (or on some other network, forgot), cool armor in the MMORPG. Also see idea 5b in “free software”, it will also fit here.
5. DPihto : Another way to earn money is to sell the intranet versions of the favorite free-service to corporate clients.
6. DPihto : It is still strange that no one remembered about the sale of paraphernalia. A good option is personalized attributes , reflecting the activity of a particular user (cloud of his tags, his Nickname, ID, skills, karmapoints, etc.)
7. DPihto : Another missed, I think, source of finance is grants . Venture capital investments imply the creation of a business, while grants are allocated for thematic developments.
8. roden : user consultation using paid phone numbers (when the caller pays)
9. crazywebdev : sms-voting (give people a controversial topic and a way to vote for one of the options -prm. My)
10. TedBeer : Temporary accounts - a full-featured service is provided free of charge, say, for half a year / year. [similar to “Shareware / trialware”]
Separately: cyberwaste : Traffic monetization of [Vkontakte] ... profits are made by the personnel division “Professional contacts”, which is engaged in the recruitment of personnel among the multimillion audience of the network.
And now tell me the Habra people ... on what they earn:
Jokes in italics.
... DropBox - sells files passwords.txt and bank_accounts.txt to Panama bankstreamists ?
... YubNub ( wrote earlier ) - is going to compete with MSDOS ?
... cloudcache - these I really fear - free memcached ?? What are they thinking ??
... any other service where there is no advertising and payment?
Useful thought from mylh : A successful Internet project and a successful business are two completely different things. A project can have mega popularity, fame and attendance and at the same time be unprofitable - this is obvious and exposed to many examples: Twitter, Youtube, odnoklassniki, vkontakte. Are these successful projects? Of course. Are they profitable? Not. Live at the expense of investors.
Where do we take traffic
1. Almost black referral spam method . When my bot comes to someone, he leaves Referral, but [!] This page shows his site from an unusual point of view (for a long time to explain). In general, it brings potential benefit to this person + there is a link to him, so I (and many readers of my blog) thought it was interesting - this is something about them!
I even once refused this method, but I was forced to return positive feedback. Plus it gave see (2.)
Important! If you use this method - give people a way to lock your bot ( example ) via robots.txt or .htaccess, because it can annoy. And in general it is good practice, and in Python it is done in a couple of lines.
Result: first, this traffic gave about 100% of visitors, now about 20%. With a million bypassed domains - a thousand people. In the base of 72 million (truth of the trash ....) The bot takes 55 days to go around the Web (its meaning is not in the referral links, but in the indexing of the web, and this is processing of html, etc. - quite a long time, Ref. Links appeared only as an addition to the bot)
2. Publication in cool industry publications : TechCrunch and the like.
Frankly, this is obvious, but for some reason he did not reach it. One of the people who came to my ref-spam project wrote an article and sent it to Erick Schonfield (someone very high in TechCranch), and Eric published his article (link above), inserting that person’s article into the center and even a link to his site. Result: 10,000 transitions . That person also received about a hundred clicks to his site simply for describing my project. Then we talked with Eric and he said that such publications often publish what readers send them. So - write, send to TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb , (Google Trends section " also visited " to help you) - publish and you will be stunned by how many people there are able to move in a minute :)
Cascade effect : many other editions, including KillerStartups and many small blogs. After that, heise.de connected - they gave almost 30,000 transitions of Germans and I worked for three days to clean the site (everything is there without registration).
3. StumbleUpon - probably the most useless traffic. None of the thousands who have transferred at all did nothing on the site. Don't even bother.
4. I wrote a review about the rare new CouchDB database system. This was noticed by one of the authors of CouchDB, Jan Lehnardt, and put a link to my project and blog (I did not send it anywhere, just very few materials on the word “couchdb”).
Generalization - write about rare new things . (How to find them? [I need the Spoiler button to remove pieces under it] I have one project [it is very experimental and looks like a big dump , but I’m working on it] - it can help to find Rare News, so called 70,000 news sources (RSS is not used) - you can try, for example, news for today on Web 2.0 and similar topics - there is a wide categorization - news about Iraq will include all the news that the USA has invaded :) the algorithm is being worked out).
5. Reddit picked up the news too, and I also rewrote the “Rare News” engine and found that Django flows in memory while parallelizing (at my load of 70,000 sources it is cruel - gig per minute). To which I was very offended and wrote a rather angry post, but Reddit readers were not less offended, they said that I couldn’t write programs and use the tools and came up with a couple of thousand commentators who said that Django was not leaking. I used only ORM from Django , not all.
To summarize: when we find something unusual in well-known things, this raises a fuss. Learning to notice - what unusual we found.
6. At this point, I already tested (good Django promotes) Postgres vs MyISAM vs InnoDB and discovered the slowness of PostgreSQL for my purposes . What he wrote about. The people at reddit considered it a provocation and again put a link. A thousand more people (and reproaches that I don’t know how to customize Postgres). As a result - kamenty on the blog are closed - tired of reading holivary. Of course, working as a troll wasn’t my desire, as well as insulting PostgreSQL (only to show that for me and my goal it didn’t work), but ...
To summarize: provocations work , even if you were not going to do them.
And now we are playing ... I suggest to write your ideas and stories, thoughts in kamenta - how traffic was obtained and it is desirable to summarize, suggest how it could be used by other people. And I will add them to the topic as far as useful. You can also write services that are not clear how to monetize - we will look for how they did it.
WARNING: it's not about what my projects do to pay off - I will find the very way sooner or later, let's get NEW ideas that can help other people.
Yoi Haji
view from Habra
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/39761/
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