[holgersindbaek]

It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them.

One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spent time improving the site, optimizing speed and improving SEO. A couple of years later, the site is now earning $10k+ a month .

[donatj]

I run a blog that gets about 200k unique users a month. My wife lost her job at the beginning of Covid-19, and I slapped a single ad on my most popular post to supplement our income. I hate ads, but income is income. It’s bringing in over $300 a month.

Fast forward to now, my wife has a new job. I still hate ads, but I have become accustomed to that extra $300 each month and have had trouble talking myself into taking it down.

The moral here? I am working on that myself.

[willis936]

I moved to an area where the only engineering work is defense contracts. I have been and am morally opposed to the MIC both for its primary product being death and for its massive societal waste. We have high rent and bills to pay and I am working for a defense contractor.

My joke since moving has been "I like my morals and will stick to them as long as it's convenient."

[sparks1970]

"These are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others." - Groucho Marx.

[quacked]

Can I ask why you don't just move somewhere else?

[willis936]

For similar reasons as the parent: my SO's research group moved. Their PI then got diagnosed with a terminal illness and the department leaders are taking the lab space and grant money. To quote a friend of mine, we got "hyperfucked".

It's a tough crossroads. I am applying for work I really care about far away while my SO may still have a path to finish. No good answers, but we'll stick together through thick and thin.

[11101010001100]

I'm sure this occurred to you, but is remote work an option?

[willis936]

It has, but it's pretty hard to find. I sent out about 100 applications every time I try to find a job, hear back from maybe 20 and get offers from less than 5. I've never heard back from an application for remote work. I have thrived in my short stints of remote work in the past (mid 2019).

I'm not really a tech insider here, more of an engineer in search of discourse more stimulating than reddit. Also, I think discourse with wealthy and influential people is one of the few ways I have to attempt to better the world.

[holgersindbaek]

Congrats with the side income .

I've kind of thought about the moral of it myself. I ended up integrating Stripe to let people remove the ads. For a blog that might not make sense, but for a solitaire website where some people play an hour or two a day, it makes sense. I think the lowest pricing I had was a one-time fee of $5 and basically no-one uses it. I'm super surpriced how few people use it. But if you won't pay for playing, you're gonna get ads . And from what I can see, people are fine with this arrangement.

[Kye]

1: set up a Patreon or Ko-fi with monthly memberships enabled

2: replace the ad with an ad for your thing

You don't even have to offer any perks. In my experience and in those I've heard, most people don't care about "rewards." They come to support. Just make a few tiers since people tend to pledge along them.

[donatj]

I might try that. I've got a PayPal donation button that used to fetch me maybe $30 a month but it's been far less since the ad went up.

[revicon]

Which ad network/provider did you use for your ad? Did you shop around for the best paying one?

[donatj]

I just use adsense. Haven't shopped around at all. If you have recommendations I'm all ears.

[ignoramous]

You could try this if you want to: www.ethicalads.io (by folks at Read the Docs).

[revicon]

I've got no experience in shopping around for ads, was hoping you did :) My blog gets decent traffic these days, seems like I should stick an ad or two someplace so it pays for itsself.

[holgersindbaek]

I initially started with Google Adsense, but has later moved to Freestar. They basically connect you with 10+ ad networks (including Google Adsense) and then all the networks will compete for your ad space each time an ad is shown. In my experience the revenue is a lot better.

[joshfee]

Glad you're earning some money, but I turned ad-blocker off to see how you incorporated ads on your site - honestly taking up a quarter of the screen with autoplay videos and blinking ads is some toxic 90s geocities stuff... ad-blocker going right back on.

[holgersindbaek]

I started with a lot less ads, but have since then put more on. I don't like it either, but people really don't mind it that much it seems. I also have an option where people can pay to remove the ads. Basically no one uses it.

[ffhhj]

I use uBlock Origin, but as developer the easier way to earn money is to feed ads to that 90-ish % of users that don't have an adblocker. I used to force interstitials and videos when starting my apps, but removed them to avoid bad ratings. People seem happy with double banners top/down and affiliate links.

[coryrc]

Maybe that's because they haven't built a profile of you to give you better targeted ads?

[FridayoLeary]

Please! Won't somebody please give me better targeted ads!

[vyper91]

Damn, that's an excellent earner! Well done lol. I've never played Solitaire to completion and I just checked it out and spent 8 minutes of my life playing Solitaire and completing for the first time, lol. Really smooth experience :)

[holgersindbaek]

Haha. I'm glad you liked it .

[oops]

Really nice execution! How is it monetized though? I don't see any ads, only an "upsell" to a native app but it also appears to be free?

Edit: I see the ad sidebar now. FYI on my first visit I played for several minutes and this never opened

[TimLeland]

I wonder if the delay is intentional so users start paying and want to finish. If they saw ads, they may immediately leave. Also ads can slow down a website load times so the delay may be for SEO.

[holgersindbaek]

It's intentional. The first 5 games are ad-free. Most of the ad-revenue are from people who stick, so I kind of try to give people the best experience the first 5 games.

[dataexporter]

Isn't that kind of like penalizing your regular - repeat customers?

[bigprof]

Except they are not his "customers", they are his product :)

[savorypiano]

Any chance you can give me pointers on how to improve SEO for my sudoku site? It's been up for 8 years now and I've left it for dead since user growth wasn't happening. Thanks!

http://www.sudokuisland.com/

[holgersindbaek]

Congrats with the site. I've only just had a glance at it, but I think there's a lot you can do. Make it HTTPS first of all, research all keywords that relate to sudoku, write a long article about it and have it on the main page. Make sure you on-page SEO is good and keep doing off-page SEO (getting backlinks). If you want to take SEO a bit more seriously, read through a guide like this to start with: https://backlinko.com/seo-this-year. That's what I did to de-mystify SEO in the beginning.

[tech-historian]

I opened your site in multiple separate browsers and the starting card arrangement was the same in all of them. Do you start new users off with the same setup of cards to ensure a good playing experience and hook them?

[jedberg]

On the bottom in the "New Game" menu is has "Random Shuffle" and "Daily Challenge (current)", so I assume it defaults to the daily challenge, which I assume is the same for everyone.

[atentaten]

How many monthly visitors do you have?

[holgersindbaek]

I can't remember the specifics, but about 4 million games are played on the site each month.

[TimLeland]

SimilarWeb says 342K monthly visitors. Always curious how accurate these tools are.

[TimLeland]

The competitor solitaired.com is doing over 6 millions views a month and has similar ads. My guess is they could be making over 150,000 a month from ads.

[detritus]

Blimey, well done you! .

Tell me, have you set the difficulty on the first played game to some level that might artificially encourage further play? I only ask as I've not played solitaire in literally 20 years or so and everything on the game I just played on your site seemed to fall in to place remarkably easily... .

ed - spelling, grammar

[holgersindbaek]

Thanks .

Yes I have. Most solitaire games these days have an option of playing a fully random game or a winnable deal. The automatic deal when a user comes to the site is a winnable deal.

[detritus]

Bravo!

[baby]

Same here. A long time ago I was running a website for fun, a friend told me I was crazy not to have ads, added ads and started making 4000€/month

[holgersindbaek]

Damn man. Sounds nice . What website was it?

[baby]

Not sure if you remember, back then you could add “like buttons” from facebook on your webpages, and if someone would like it it would display “X liked ‘music saved my life’” (if that was the title of the page) on their timeline. Which would make a lot of people “like” the page by clicking on the like button located on the timeline this time. I had seen these english websites doing this with a lot of funny or inspirational sentences like that, so I created the first French website like that. I was in the top alexa 500 for some time, then facebook decided that this feature was dumb because it was, and all these websites died. It was nice money while I was still a student though :)

during my first year of uni I had to do a presentation about what I wanted to do in life and how I was planning to find a job and make money after graduating. In front of two professionals that were here to help guide students (and probably making less than me). It was graded. I told them that it didn’t matter because I was already making bank lol, they didn’t believe me and gave me a shit grade. Good times.

[z-10]

Hey, just wanted to point out that your spider and freecell games are marked as unsafe/contains malware in Edge for some reason.

[holgersindbaek]

Thanks. I'll make a note of it and take a look at it.

[slig]

Hi, thanks for sharing. Is the widget thing working for your website? I also run a game website and I'm thinking of letting people use some of my games in widgets, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Thanks!

[conradfr]

That's amazing.

I'm trying to monetize a site I have but after a few impressions Adsense has left all my slots unfilled since. Of course, you can't contact anybody ... quite frustrating.

[holgersindbaek]

I switched from Adsense to Freestar and have been very happy with them. I think you'll have to have a certain amount of volume to get signed with them, but it's difinitely another ballgame than Google Adsense.

[jasfi]

So, don't sell yourself short?

[holgersindbaek]

Something like that .

[nkg]

That's crazy.