[j42]

Well, "startup" is a poor choice of words, but he actually has a half-decent idea.

As someone who owns dozens of little "tool" sites (think less/scss converters, meme generators, JS beautifiers, etc), I can tell you each is probably 1-2 pages, took an hour to build and thankfully due to some domain squatting (kw in domain) and a low bounce rate I don't have to worry much about SEO.

As for the Adsense revenue, I think you'd be quite surprised.

One is an afternoon, not a startup idea.

50, on the other hand, could be passive income for a very long time.

Just something to consider before jumping to negativity. ;)

[kgtm]

Interesting. I would love to hear more details, like how much traffic you are bringing in total from these mini-apps and how much income from Adsense.

[j42]

I have two books in my queue actually, and this is one of them.

There are parts of my content-property model I'm not ready to share, but most of it has been structured into a cohesive framework of how I:

1. find niches 2. automate site creation 3. optimize w/ gpt (google publisher tag)

I'm sorry to say I won't be releasing that first... The first is due within the next 12-14 days, after which it should take me 1-2 months to finish writing & editing the adsense-property-model guide.

To leave you with something tangible, it's very feasible to produce 5-figures per day with only hosting cost as your overhead ($300/mo).

[edit] without automation tools though, it would obviously be very tedious to produce the number of properties required to have that kind of income by hand. process flow & site generation/management is the crux of this strategy.

[kgtm]

Thanks for the reply. Does site creation involve pure content sites as well as simple web apps? Or maybe some kind of hybrid for SEO purposes?

I would love to read more once you have something published. You should consider adding some contact info in your profile so that people won't go on a stalking expedition to find you (as i did) :)

[j42]

Hah, the way you phrase that makes me wonder what you found.

Right now really just web apps. Content sites are doable, and I know people running networks, but it's not possible to do profitably without clickbaiting, low-quality mass-produced content, and other greyhat techniques I don't particularly like.

I think it's fair to show you an ad if I save you 30 seconds to a minute of time. Creating garbage content slideshows with writers from the 3rd world countries to rack up pageviews is one step over the line for me...

Simple apps are great because they have utility (so google always approves your tag), and honestly the doubleclick exchange isn't so bad -- with enough simple single-page apps, it accrues pretty quickly.

[sbierwagen]

Automated site creation... what, you're taking some public domain content, loading it up with ads, then hoping it ends up higher in the SERP than the original source?

How is this different than filling amazon with autogenerated kindle "books" made from Wikipedia articles?

[j42]

Not exactly, I think it was a poor choice of words as I was referring to my build/deployment tooling.

If I have an idea (e.g. a "ES2015 to ECMA6" converter), I'd look for a library to do this (if there isn't an open source one, I'd consider building my own as a learning experience).

Setting up the webpage up (converter/form) is trivial since it's really just one page and a few settings.

The really cool part is I've built laravel commands to do the hard work for me. They can:

- buy domains based on a keyword search with some common regex-like patterns

- set up a git hook to continuously deploy to an AWS micro instance via codedeploy/CircleCI

- manage different adsense codes across properties

So, if you're wondering these are things that have utility. I'm optimizing the pains of setting up each site, though.

I do build adservers for a living, but never once have I created a crappy content-farm click-baiting blog -- they are the scourge of the internet >:{

[edit] lastly, I'm not sure if you have a problem with google ads (doubleclick/google publisher network) but I think they're pretty sensible in what they allow... no reasonable person would take issue with that.

[biot]

5 figures per day as in $10K+ every day? Impressive! How many of those tools require constant automation? Something like a CSS converter or JS beautifier should only need updating to fix bugs or due to updates of underlying libraries.

[aaronem]

>5-figures per day

Where among them is the decimal point?