Has anybody ever built a 1 million+ page view site?

[ausername]

Yeah but all the traffic is looking for lyrics to songs. It's got to be among some of the worst converting traffic there is, same as forum traffic.

With the greatest respect, my most successful venture online was allegedly a 'low paying niche' and ended up making me $3000 a month passive income over 2.5 years with 15 pages of content and no attempt at all at off page SEO, so I'll give it a whirl. If you can generate a large amount of traffic you can find a way to make it work for you.... much of that traffic looking for lyrics will have youtube open in another window, and the uploader to youtube will be looking to squeeze traffic through their itunes link to purchase the associated album or ep, I'll have a crack at squeezing some of it through my links.

And if I don't make any money then does it matter? Everybody is double quick keen to tell people that X and Y niche won't make any money, but will never tell them which ones do. Every niche is congested, but I think looking for some sort of get rich quick scheme is completely the wrong way to look at things....

.... how about I build the site I want to see exist, enjoy building it, and if it gets traffic somewhere down the line have a go at making it work for me? I much prefer that way of working. I'm not driving a 50 grand car, but I've never hit my overdraft so it suits me.

I mean.... yeah there's loads of money to be made writing about 'money saving' or whatever, but it would bore me senseless and would probably require some serious financial investment to crack it, expensive facebook ads for facebook followers etc, so there is always the risk-reward ratio.

If I'm risking nothing, which I'm not, then making no money isn't a problem. Now if I were paying somebody £5k to build me an all bells and whistles custom lyrics site and predicting I'd be a millionaire this time next year then by all means call me an idiot....

... but some sites are a labour of love, Jimmy Wales is not a millionaire. I'm just building a site which I think should exist, mostly for fun and my initial target is always for a site to just pay for itself and not be a financial liability.... I need a whopping $90 a year for this to cover its share of my hosting bill and domain renewal for it to 'pay for itself'.

 

[boxfish]

With the greatest respect, my most successful venture online was allegedly a 'low paying niche' and ended up making me $3000 a month passive income over 2.5 years with 15 pages of content and no attempt at all at off page SEO, so I'll give it a whirl. If you can generate a large amount of traffic you can find a way to make it work for you.... much of that traffic looking for lyrics will have youtube open in another window, and the uploader to youtube will be looking to squeeze traffic through their itunes link to purchase the associated album or ep, I'll have a crack at squeezing some of it through my links.

And if I don't make any money then does it matter? Everybody is double quick keen to tell people that X and Y niche won't make any money, but will never tell them which ones do. Every niche is congested, but I think looking for some sort of get rich quick scheme is completely the wrong way to look at things....

.... how about I build the site I want to see exist, enjoy building it, and if it gets traffic work have a go at making it work for me? I much prefer that way of working. I'm not driving a 50 grand car, but I've never hit my overdraft so it suits me.

I mean.... yeah there's loads of money to be made writing about 'money saving' or whatever, but it would bore me senseless and would probably require some serious financial investment to crack it, so there is always the risk-reward ratio.

If I'm risking nothing, which I'm not, then making no money isn't a problem. Now if I were paying somebody £5k to build me an all bells and whistles custom lyrics site and predicting I'd be a millionaire this time next year then by all means call me an idiot....

... but some sites are a labour of love, Jimmy Wales is not a millionaire.

All the talk about "30, 60 and 90 day cookies across the land" made me miss the fact it was a labour of love, sorry. Good luck with your site.

 

[ausername]

All the talk about "30, 60 and 90 day cookies across the land" made me miss the fact it was a labour of love, sorry. Good luck with your site.

Packing dozens of pieces of tack every day = I do that to pay my mortgage, and don't enjoy it at all.

Building websites and stuff = I love that, any which make me some money a bonus. If the above didn't exist, perhaps I'd have a different outlook.

That's all I'm saying.

Bare in mind perhaps that I used to make my living entirely off adsense and amazon associates commissions, and then had depression for 3 years after it all collapsed, so that may help to explain why I'm approaching this with this mindset and not just chasing dollars this time trying to see it more as a hobby which pays for itself.

I'm probably semi-consciously easing my way back into this as a hobbyist because I'm wary of the possible fragility of my mental health, to be frank.

 

[ausername]

Alexa.......laughable, I'm not totally sure what its like today and I don't wish to know.

I know you said you don't wish to know, but it used to be the case that it would use data from the alexa toolbar which of course only a certain type of person would install (SEO's, developers, marketers). So as you said, an SEO blog would have a higher ranking than a gardening blog even if the latter had 10 times more traffic.

My understanding is that its a bit more complex now and that Amazon uses data samples from every browser extension that it has, of which there are many and that because they pertain to Amazon customers they can create a sample which includes an equal number of x demographic, y demographic and z demographic.

So that line about the toolbar is a bit outdated and the discrepancy between different types of site shouldn't be as profound. Whether it is still easy to 'game' the system by installing toolbars and get a bot refreshing constantly for a few hours.... probably is, flippa removed alexa ranking from their search filters because sellers would pump up their Alexa rank before listing a site for sale.

 

[ausername]

As an aside... I'd love to know who paid $80,000 for lyrics.co.uk and why!

Seems like the perfect example of a site that you would never stick on a .uk or a .com.au or a .us or a .ca.... because the English language is international.

German lyrics on a .de make sense, but not english lyrics on a .co.uk.

 

[dee]

As an aside... I'd love to know who paid $80,000 for lyrics.co.uk and why!

Seems like the perfect example of a site that you would never stick on a .uk or a .com.au or a .us or a .ca.... because the English language is international.

German lyrics on a .de make sense, but not english lyrics on a .co.uk.

Sorry.... dont get why English lyrics on a co.uk dont make sense ? com probaby not available at that price

Seems lyrics.co.uk is up for sale at mo if you go there. Accepting offers at lot less than 80k

 

[ausername]

Sorry.... dont get why English lyrics on a co.uk dont make sense ? com probaby not available at that price

Seems lyrics.co.uk is up for sale at mo if you go there. Accepting offers at lot less than 80k

I wouldn't pay them $1000 for it.

375 million native English speakers in the world, another 1.1 billion who speak it as a second language.... so any site with english language lyrics makes no sense on a geo domain to me. Bearing in mind that Google gives love to .co.uk domains when people are searching from the UK.

You can set your domain to target global traffic or a specific country in webmaster tools, but how many .co.uk domains do you think show up in American or Canadian searches? You buy a .co.uk domain if you want to target UK traffic...

There is a reason why The Guardian is on a .com.

The Daily Mail by the way has a UK site on a .co.uk and an international site on a .com (Mailonline.com) which targets US traffic. A UK visitor gets redirected to the .co.uk, but international visitors do not.

A lyrics site on a .co.uk makes no sense.

 

[ausername]

Only 1 .co.uk lyrics domain recorded in namebio (in history).

59 .coms

 

[dee]

Aaaah....see what you mean .

 

[scottmccloud]

I agree with @ausername , Lyrics.co.uk is one of those domains that on the face of it you think "Wow!". But dig a little deeper and its value comes tumbling down...

 

[davedevelopment]

Agreed, I thought lyrics.co.uk was a crazy price!

Although I didn't build it myself, I first got involved as a freelancer (via Acorn!) with our site in a month where it did 1m pageviews, now we do around 7m.

 

[dog]

Music sites are notoriously hard to monetize properly.

As is typical with my personality type, my initial buzz about my hobby forum domain died down and its now about 3rd in my list of domains I want to develop... sitting in a category all on its own called "lets see if this hobby does actually continue grow into something big in 2018 before wasting time, money and energy"

Entering the very crowded world of 'lyrics' sites, will be a tough one to crack but I've gone genre specific and the first dedicated to this genre (after Rap Genius took VC money and rebranded as Genius, and started publishing Taylor Swift lyrics). This site.

If I can eventually establish traffic then I'd look to sign up as an itunes affiliate and have purchase links on every 'album' plus 'track' page. I know how competitive this niche is, but I like the idea of giving it a shot because its a UK specific genre so most traffic will be British, and there are soooooo many Awin affiliate schemes with fit it, especially fashion (Converse, Brown Bag Clothing, etc), I'm already accepted into HMV for another site.

Unfortunately Discogs doesn't have an affiliate scheme because some of the early stuff and EPs which got very limited vinyl presses are worth some serious dollar, £50 - £100 a lot of it. Suffice to say that I don't give away traffic to large profitable commercial operations for free!

(Go ahead, tag me optimistic, I don't care )

 

[ausername]

Music sites are notoriously hard to monetize properly.

I'm a bit short of other ideas to be honest.

Everything is ever 'hard to monetize' or potentially valuable but super competitive.

Been thinking about a user generated content site of some sort, but I'm worried that I'll end up with a site making no money but then feeling some sort of morale obligation to keep it running regardless, and then being a pariah when I close it and leave people internet-homeless. Got a forum costing me money that I haven't got the bottle to close at the minute.

Had a small version of a squidoo / hubpages once, and had people kicking off when I closed it.... plus Google hates those types of sites these days.

One idea I did have was to build a second documentary site but it being completely user submission, where people decide the direction and content by submitting themselves. Problem there is that people are happy to share links, but never happy to write more than a one line description so they'll copy and paste the IMDB description or whatever.... probably struggle to rank due to duplicate content issues, plus it would end up competing with another web property of mine and mess up its current momentum.

Looked at starting an image hosting site, where people upload and then embed on forums etc, but difficult to persuade people t use yours over other established competition and people are wary of new entrants dissapearing and killing their photos on forums etc. They seem to just compete on max file size now, but I'd personally want to be quite strict on that to keep storage costs to a minimum. Trying to fill a quirky niche, like being a meme host or purely a gif host is a nice idea (people browse the uploads) but struggling to find an appropriate domain without paying out a fortune.

Grrrr.... hard to know what to do.

Although in defense of 'lyrics sites' and 'forums' which are notoriously difficult to monetise..... the web is a better place for people ignoring that isn't it? We wouldn't be having a discussion right now if the O.G. of Acorn dismissed forums as difficult to monetise, and Rap Genius raised $40 million to finance a rebrand and expansion recently, Metrolyrics made millionaires of the founders, so there are always exceptions to the rule.

 

[Adam H]

Lyric site ending in 2 mins on flippa for anyone interested

https://flippa.com/9211197-sweetslyrics-com

WIll give you an idea of revenue capability.

 

[ausername]

That 'low paying niche' that made me $3000 a month by the way was facebook status ideas, when facebook was at its peak.... ranked number 1 for 'funny facebook status', 'hilarious facebook status' and numerous other long tail terms.... cpc $0.01 allegedly, made an absolute killing and about 1 million hits a month (on a content farm, not my own website). Well adsense proved more like $1.5 CPM and I drove sh*t loads of traffic through Amazon Associate links, plus managed to direct some of it to a higher paying niche's. All sorts of stuff that Google would penalise me for today, but still managed to make traffic work for me.

 

[ausername]

Lyric site ending in 2 mins on flippa for anyone interested

https://flippa.com/9211197-sweetslyrics-com

WIll give you an idea of revenue capability.

I wouldn't grumble at $500 a month for what is essentially 95% passive income on a side project, in fairness. Not much less than I get for renting out a flat I own.

But I'm going niche which is a bit of an experiment. I will actually have a news section, and I'm sort of half a directory of albums and half lyrics site. Its actually impossible to find a list of G***e albums anywhere on the internet because all the big sites lump it in with 'hip hop' from around the world, so not everybody is going to hit my site looking for lyrics. 'G***e Albums' gets searches in itself, it will also essentially be a directory of albums from the niche.

Also with mine being a UK specific genre and other G***e sites getting 85%+ UK traffic from what I've been able to ascertain, I can at least expect a higher CPM from re-marketing ads than one which is getting 50% top tier traffic and 50% from India, China, and Brazil or something.

Anyway its an experiment and I'm quite open, so I'll tell you whether it costs me money or makes me some beer money in due course!

How about I shoot for $200 a month, that will do me.... that's a good meal out and a bit of a pub crawl on the way home.

 

[ausername]

Ps. I think domainers imparting negativity and pessimism towards anybody building anything when it could discourage them entirely is very backwards, although admittedly all so very British, my old user account purchased 5 domains on Acorn Domains and a couple on Domain Lore which essentially went undeveloped, and I've bought quite a few wordpress themes which went unused. I've started stuff and abandoned it, I've done X which works and Y which doesn't. Its all part of the ecosystem, the oxygen that you breathe.

There may be a slim chance that this site proves worth my time, but if it does then perhaps the UK based 10 year long owner of Gr*meLyr*cs.com would be getting an enquiry from me, and if I decided to abandon it now because people who have never build a lyrics site tell me that a lyrics site isn't worth my time, then he definitely wouldn't be getting that enquiry one day would he.

Domainers may make 1 X domain investment which pays off big time and 5 Y investments which don't. Its no different from starting 5 sites and deciding that 1 is worth keeping for 10 years and 4 are worth deleting.

Somebody on here sold me 4 domains (.co.uk + .uk, plural + singular) 2 years ago for £££ which all got dropped this week because I couldn't be bothered in the end, that's just how it goes. If you had good ideas you'd be building them instead of criticizing everybody elses.

But $500 a month passive income for a low resource site which could be shoved on $20 wordpress optimized hosting and consists of nothing other than essentially scrapped content.... and can be sold for $8000.... people sneer their nose up at that do they? Sounds like good money to be me in fairness.... pretty sure there are plenty of people on here who would love a £400 domain sale each month for £15 a month in investment That would essentially be 24 hand regs a year for 12 x £400 sales? Every month almost entirely passively? And that's supposed to be discouragement? When people are on here all day trying to palm off domains at £25 a piece?

 

[boxfish]

Ps. I think domainers imparting negativity and pessimism towards anybody building anything when it could discourage them entirely is very backwards

People aren't being negative about 'building stuff', just building the wrong stuff.

 

[dee]

I'm still trying to get to the 500 a month passive income. It's good fun trying though

 

[ausername]

People aren't being negative about 'building stuff', just building the wrong stuff.

So the internet needs another lead gen insurance comparison website or money saving or investment blog written by somebody who is not a registered financial adviser, then basically, because that pays.... and Milun Tesovic is an idiot for building a lyrics website, and Acorn Domains shouldn't exist because its a forum and forums are difficult to monetise.

I'm probably in quite a small club of people on here who have literally made a living from adsense in the past, so I'm happy to continue my trial and error. Not like you are going to tell me about that great lucrative and unsaturated niche you are harboring is it, probably because it doesn't exist.

Apparently people seem to find it difficult to fathom that $500 a month for a website is a decent income, because people are capable of owning multiple income producing web properties.... like the owner of this forum, the one which should never have been built. I once had 40 or 50, some earned just $20 a month, one or two $1000 a month.... $20 a month is worth the domain renewal and space on your sever if its a 'set and forget' site.

Ultimately fans of grime music will decide whether having a searchable database of every grime album and EP ever made is valuable to them, such a resource doesn't already exist.