I'd love to know too, but can wait till August. I know how he feels, I had something that made anywhere between 3-10k a month through 2007-2008 and there's no way I would have shared it at the time because it was too fragile and easily "copied" (for the last year I've made nothing from it because people did catch on.) It was a collection of blog posts referencing online route finders in certain ways that meant I got a lot of traffic that clicked, in high numbers, on well paying ads to get to the original site. Totally accidental, but it eventually paid for my wedding and a car in all. I'm keen not to equate my sheer good luck with the hard work Max is doing however ;-)
Search for "aa route finder." One of my posts is now on page 2 (but used to be 2nd or 3rd) - the domain contains my HN username.
I used to post all sorts of trash on my old personal blog and was doing very short "reviews" of route finders as I discovered new ones. Once I noticed something crazy going on with my ad income, about six months on, I turned up the positioning (within policy) on those individual pages to see if I could maximise the income.
None of this has made more than $50 or so over the last year, alas. You'll notice there are now a lot of sites above mine doing similar things. There's a lot of money in things like that, but I only came across it by accident. It's not the sort of thing I'd go out of my way to engineer as it just feels cheap. That probably makes me an idiot :-)
(It's a great story, though, because a lot of people thought I was wasting my time personal blogging in the 2000-2005 area and it's amazing how random activities can pay off.)
Comments
I'd love to know too, but can wait till August. I know how he feels, I had something that made anywhere between 3-10k a month through 2007-2008 and there's no way I would have shared it at the time because it was too fragile and easily "copied" (for the last year I've made nothing from it because people did catch on.) It was a collection of blog posts referencing online route finders in certain ways that meant I got a lot of traffic that clicked, in high numbers, on well paying ads to get to the original site. Totally accidental, but it eventually paid for my wedding and a car in all. I'm keen not to equate my sheer good luck with the hard work Max is doing however ;-)
"referencing online route finders in certain ways"
What were these certain ways and can we see the blog?
Search for "aa route finder." One of my posts is now on page 2 (but used to be 2nd or 3rd) - the domain contains my HN username.
I used to post all sorts of trash on my old personal blog and was doing very short "reviews" of route finders as I discovered new ones. Once I noticed something crazy going on with my ad income, about six months on, I turned up the positioning (within policy) on those individual pages to see if I could maximise the income.
None of this has made more than $50 or so over the last year, alas. You'll notice there are now a lot of sites above mine doing similar things. There's a lot of money in things like that, but I only came across it by accident. It's not the sort of thing I'd go out of my way to engineer as it just feels cheap. That probably makes me an idiot :-)
(It's a great story, though, because a lot of people thought I was wasting my time personal blogging in the 2000-2005 area and it's amazing how random activities can pay off.)