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Ask HN: How to monetize we website with 80.000 page views per month

2 points by sareiodata 14y ago

The website in question is <a href="http://gamers-lab.com" >gamers-lab.com</a> It's a portal for system requirements and release dates for games. Currently, a friend works on it as a hobby and gets $40 - $50 per month from Google Adsense. Traffic related, it's been growing organically (and linear), comes from search mostly and currently it's around 80.000 page views per month. There's a little bit of extra functionality besides the standard listing of system requirements and release dates: - possibility to create an account on the site (http://www.gamers-lab.com/register/) - once you create an account you can enter your gaming system (processor, video card, etc) and based on it you get a "You can run this game" feedback when you visit a game. So where to go from here? Some ideas we had: - affiliate sales for games (we actually tried this but it didn't work) - subscribe to notifications for new games when they get released (to increase user retention and traffic) - payed members? Perhaps $5 per year. Not sure what to offer for this to be worth for the users. Any feedback is more then welcomed. Thank you.

acoyfellow 14y ago
Congrats on getting to this point- I hope someday I'll get to this level. But to answer your question (coming from a college student): My first thought was to be able to pre-order these games, but you said that didn't work. What about instead of selling the games, since your main idea is focused around the system requirements- you could do affiliate linking to the products users need. Then they see exactly what they need, and appreciate + gladly go through your link to get their system to the playable level? I'll be able to go to gamers-lab.com, find the game I am interested in, "Run this game", and if my computer dosen't meet the specs required I'll find the links easily I need to upgrade my rig. Sounds like a pretty slick service to me.
- sareiodata 14y ago
  Thanks! This is a really good idea and shouldn't be to hard to implement. We'll look into it to see what it takes.
  - acoyfellow 14y ago
    No problem! Care to share any light how you achieved that amount of traffic?
cheae 14y ago
You can atleast double the adsense earnings by changing your adplacement. Some suggestions : 1. Move 300X250 on the sidebar above your Facebook box. 2. Move 300X250 in the content area up, close to your content.

2 points by sareiodata 14y ago

acoyfellow 14y ago

Congrats on getting to this point- I hope someday I'll get to this level. But to answer your question (coming from a college student): My first thought was to be able to pre-order these games, but you said that didn't work. What about instead of selling the games, since your main idea is focused around the system requirements- you could do affiliate linking to the products users need. Then they see exactly what they need, and appreciate + gladly go through your link to get their system to the playable level? I'll be able to go to gamers-lab.com, find the game I am interested in, "Run this game", and if my computer dosen't meet the specs required I'll find the links easily I need to upgrade my rig. Sounds like a pretty slick service to me.

sareiodata 14y ago
Thanks! This is a really good idea and shouldn't be to hard to implement. We'll look into it to see what it takes.
- acoyfellow 14y ago
  No problem! Care to share any light how you achieved that amount of traffic?

cheae 14y ago

You can atleast double the adsense earnings by changing your adplacement. Some suggestions : 1. Move 300X250 on the sidebar above your Facebook box. 2. Move 300X250 in the content area up, close to your content.