[wtf242]

The Greatest Books https://thegreatestbooks.org

I created it in 2008 and have maintained and improved it over the years. I am trying to figure out how to monetize it more. I currently make around $2k a month. I just use adsense and have a paid membership feature through buymeacoffee. I get massive traffic and I'm pretty much the #1 result for anything related to best/greatest books.

It's built with Rails and Postgresql and hosted on 3 linode servers. I get around 250k page visits a day.

[vidyesh]

Can you go into more details, when was it built and how much time have you spent (approx) on creating the content? or is it all generated? And the traffic's gradual organic increase?

Interesting to see Adsense revenue still being so high, I imagined this category being so competitive and diluted the CPM would be very low!

I noticed your purchase modal only shows Amazon pricing, are you using their API to get prices or its scraped data. If its scraped/stale data, I would look into the pricing display guidelines for affiliates.

And why is it just Amazon and not other online bookstores too?

[wtf242]

I built it in 2008, and have rewritten it twice now since them. I have spent quite a bit of time adding new lists. It's definitely a labor of love and I do spend quite a bit of time on it.

I do use Gen AI now to generate genres, descriptions, and to grab other data. Previously years ago i would just scrape it or manually set it.

Amazon has a nice product API with up to date prices.

I am working on bookshop.org integration. I used to also do barnes & noble. The problem is neither of them have APIs to programmatically search for books, so i have to do complicated scraping. example: https://github.com/ssherman/bookshop-search

[vidyesh]

Thank you for replying. I am (on and off) building a regional price comparison website for various regional online bookstores. I do want to build a more fairer and honest monthly/yearly list something like yours and the price comparison as the main USP but more so I really like reading and enjoy exploring books even if I don't read all of the ones I wan to.

Your website is quite inspiring to me and have given me more ideas to explore. Thank you for sharing your ranking algorithm, very fascinating (and still understanding the intricacies of it).

I asked you about Amazon API because I noticed some of your prices are stale which is against their Pricing Display guidelines.

Its been a challenge for me to work with Amazon as their API is not easy to get access to, I mean I have an affiliate tag for A website but from what I've read as per their TOS I am only allowed to use it for A website and not for B. And for B I have to apply again for a new tag with a new website (which is still under development!)

I will end up working on a scraper or a few workers anyway as most online bookstores do not have an API, none have replied back to my emails inquiring the same.

[wtf242]

yeah the amazon product API has some severe limitations. I have 25,000~ books on my site, and I just don't have enough API calls in a day to keep the prices 100% updated. It's on my todo list to revisit this, but it's low on my priority list. I don't make that much from amazon refs(couple hundred a month)

I will say that I don't think they really defend their TOS too much from my experience. I used to have a cookbooks site for years that used the same affiliate tag i use for my greatest books site, and never had any issues.

[vidyesh]

Thank you for sharing your experience. This has been helpful.

[RevertBusload]

not making anything with amazon affiliate program?

[zyx_db]

oh wow, ive actually come across this organically before. good job on seo!

[samteeeee]

same here!