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by HakonAgustsson 1622 days ago
So you knew about my site before I posted it here? How - where? Thanks for the honest feedback - that is exactly what I am looking for. I know the design is not the best and we have plans to make it more modern. If I will implement an OCR API then I have to support good service and the uptime must be good. Currently I have ads from Google AdSense on my site so there is a business model - to get great traffic and revenue from Google and then when the API is ready I could have subscription plans. What other OCR providers do you like or look professional? Yes, you are right the tech is just one part - that is one of the reason I am looking for feedback here. Thanks again - great to get your valuable feedback.
1 comments
vineyardmike 1622 days ago
> Currently I have ads from Google AdSense on my site so there is a business model - to get great traffic and revenue from Google and then when the API is ready I could have subscription plans.

Yea just skip the ads and go straight to a subscription. It looks like garbage click farm sites. Ads are horrible and tech people disproportionately hate them. So if your goal is to make me think "is there an API?" then you can't look like that.

Look at Stripe/Plaid/etc to get an idea of what an API first sort of site would look like.

The big headline of plaid is "The easiest way for people to connect their financial accounts to an app" and the subtext is "get API key. click here". Don't bury your value proposition behind ads, especially when the ads google will place on your site are (a) competition or (b) spammy "CLICK HERE convert pdf now" type ads.

Visit your site via a public VPN on a clean browser without any google affiliation logged in or cookie'd. See what kind of ads actually show up. Do you want those on your site?

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HakonAgustsson 1621 days ago
I am currently using Adsense settings that allow Google to choose the placements. It seems it makes the sites too crowded with ads - I agree. We are planning on a new design and when that is done we will have specific spots for ads and not allow Google to choose how many or where to place them.
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vineyardmike 1621 days ago
I didn't know this was a thing. Google chose that ad placement? Does it vary from viewer to viewer (eg. does your page look different than mine?).

How much is the per-view income from a site that does that? This explains why a lot of crappy sites look like that - handing over control to google to maximize ad revenue income causes google algos to optimize to some maxima of low-denominator quality. Who would intentionally place full-screen ads, after all!?

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