Here's some other stats for those interested... and also this might serve as some encouragement.
I didn't have a blog at the time but wanted to write something to submit to HN so I set one up on Posterous and wrote my post. Ended up #1 for about 6 hours, and stayed on the front page for over 24 hours.
If you write anything, providing it's: original, interesting, controversial, echo-chamber'd or otherwise a decent news-scoop, you can usually get enough upvotes to make front page.
Unfortunately, I've found that the really technical posts which are awesome never seem to stick around for that long which is why it's good to check out /new every so often too.
IF YOU DON'T WRITE IT, THEY WON'T COME.
Everyone should have a blog, and providing it's not spam, you will be amazed at how easy it can be to get readers.
A rare example of words that do belong in CAPS. :-)
My one comment on the original note... I think an article that is written with the intention of being well done might be monetizable as a side effect, but I don't think the other is true. It's very hard for a low-value post with poor monetization to be voted up.
>> Unfortunately, I've found that the really technical posts which are awesome never seem to stick around for that long which is why it's good to check out /new every so often too.
That's the kind of... sad? Part of HN. Hardly anything lives for more than a day on home page. And links on /new have a few hours and then they got lost.
Not sure about others but I personally tend to look at the posts which already have a vote or two, while skipping the ones which don't. Eh, social proof goes quite far.
I think there is an opportunity for a tool which would extract the keywords from the post (not the title) and would give me some content from /new which you wouldn't have discovered from top pages. Been thinking about it for a while, what do you reckon folks?
A fairly technical post I wrote the other day made it to #1 right away and stayed on the front page for a day or so, so I can't say that no technical posts stick around...
The lesson here, for me, is that popular posts on HN aren't exactly a treasure trove. I'm not complaining about the money, but I'm somewhat underwhelmed. But you're probably spot on about the playbook.
Nice that you made your money. Unfortunately, you also gave some bad advice:
Working on a laptop only all day long is insane. You need to separate screen an keyboard, otherwise one of them will be at the wrong height. If you use a laptop, it means you need to add an external keyboard. Everything else makes absolutely no ergonomic sense!
Good point. I sometimes work from home, where I have a very different setup, but the photo on the blog shows me with the laptop stand. So far so good in terms of posture and no injuries or carpal tunnel. I think the frequent breaks really help prevent the injuries we thing are inevitable with a sub optimal ergonomic setup.
Hacker News stories are often scooped up by other news outlets. Within a day, Fox Business asked me to be on their show, Huffington Post France wrote an article about it, and I was featured briefly on Yahoo’s homepage. Here’s the video from Fox.
Congrats, though I'd say your experience happens 1 out of maybe 1000 times?
I was thinking about writing a 'me too!' post about the hits from my Raspberry Pi Microwave [1], but maybe I'll just post it here. I was on the front page of HN for a day, front page of Reddit, had articles on TechCrunch, Popular Science, BBC, and a few other technology sites. The blog post got about 91,000 page views: http://imgur.com/MpYNaHu
I had one ad at the bottom of the page, and made something like $30.
But the most interesting part was the YouTube video, which has had over 250,000 views. I monetized it from the beginning, and earned about $750. I regret not putting much effort into the video, and wonder how many more views I would have got for a more polished video. I also received a 0.8978 BTC [$78.75 USD] donation from Reddit user chrisrico, which was pretty awesome!
It's been a very positive experience, and I've reinvested all of the money into components for my next project. Watch this space :)
I'd also throw in that comments can also yield a good response. A week ago, I made a comment on a high ranking post, and though it wasn't super high up, it yielded 500 visits to a site of mine that never gets traffic, got 20ish stars on the github project and some valuable user feedback on the problem. It was pretty cool.
Yeesh, 12 new blog subscribers vs hundreds of app sales? I guess I'm guilty of not coming back to sites I find on here or twitter, but that's still a shockingly small number. I feel like it didn't used to be like that - is there a difference in the way people consume blogs vs how they did 5 years ago?
If I like an article I see on HN, I'll go back and check a few of the previous entries on the blog. If there are a couple of similarly interesting articles in the last 10 entries or so, I'll add it to my RSS reader. If not, I'll just wait for the next interesting one to get upvoted into my sphere of visibility.
Me feelings exactly. I'm not totally sure, but I think the fairly strong sales of the Furinno stand is evidence that the message matters. I was writing about standing desks and then recommended one; perhaps it would have been different if I were writing about workout apps and then recommended one of those...
The most startling aspect of this writeup is the iOS / Android revenue difference. I'd have expected Android revenues to be lower, but not by about 1/3.
I think the difference is explained by the structure of my landing page. The iOS link is most prominent at the top, but the Android link requires some reading.
I'm going to update the Power 20 site to give equal airtime to iOS and Android.
Android sales have actually recently outpaced iOS sales because I'm able to iterate on the app's name more frequently in Android. I can find out which titles work faster on Android. With iOS, one must submit a new app every time they change the name. Crazy.
Yeah, it's alarming to hear that even with millions of apps, you're seeing such a huge difference between iOS and Android sales. I'm going to change my future development plans if this is the reality for everyone.
Oh now I see the confusion. No the cut is about the same, it's the platform itself as in its users. I don't know what it is but I suppose they just tend to spend money and click ads less. I can't pinpoint the exact reason but many other developers have experienced the same trend.
I've written about this before on HN - it really is a Android vs iOS thing. I have identical apps on both stores both with millions of users. Android consistently generates 1/3 or less revenue as iOS.
You'd be surprised by how lucrative Amazon's affiliate program can be. Keep in mind that the referrer will get a commission on any Amazon purchase made within 24 hours. So while the blog post in question had a large focus on a single product, I can confidently assume that the majority (or around 30-40%) of the revenue came from purchases made that were unrelated to the product linked to by the original affiliate link.
I am going to be mad if I find an Amazon tracking cookie that makes you money ever time I buy from Amazon from now on.
Anyways, the blog was an inspiration for me to start my own blog (which I have been putting off) and gave me some ideas for a way for it to fund itself.
I may visit 100s of websites daily and none of them have anything to do with what I usually buy on Amazon. I don't want someone to profit off the measuring cups I bought off Amazon or the alternator I got on eBay because I visited a blog about a guy with a standing desk.
Your issue is with Amazon's system, then, not with the affiliates themselves. It's what Amazon has set up. There are plugins to replace any Amazon Affiliate link with your own, if you're absolutely dead-set against it.
I didn't have a blog at the time but wanted to write something to submit to HN so I set one up on Posterous and wrote my post. Ended up #1 for about 6 hours, and stayed on the front page for over 24 hours.
http://www.chrisacky.com/images/stats.png
But do you know what I loved the most...
After I wrote the content and submitted to HN, I took my dog for a half hour dog walk.. and came back to this.
http://www.chrisacky.com/images/trends.png
If you write anything, providing it's: original, interesting, controversial, echo-chamber'd or otherwise a decent news-scoop, you can usually get enough upvotes to make front page.
Unfortunately, I've found that the really technical posts which are awesome never seem to stick around for that long which is why it's good to check out /new every so often too.
IF YOU DON'T WRITE IT, THEY WON'T COME.
Everyone should have a blog, and providing it's not spam, you will be amazed at how easy it can be to get readers.