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

2 points by sareiodata 14 years ago | 4 comments

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 14 years 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 14 years 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 14 years ago | | |

No problem!

Care to share any light how you achieved that amount of traffic?

cheae 14 years 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.