It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

[swombat]

So, basically, create a demand-media site but without even paying writers the $3/hour to create crap articles? Just scrape them from the government? :-)

I'm all for the lifestyle business thing, but there are more fulfilling ways to make $2k/month, imho... As the cost of creating businesses drops, the number of viable niches literally explodes.

[rmc]

This isn't "scraping government websites", this is using your skills as a programmer to manipulate data, to make graphs and visualizations of the data.

[mattdeboard]

>As the cost...drops, the number of viable niches literally explodes

My God, thank you for the warning. I will be alert for exploding numbers!

[getsat]

I believe that most people would be willing to set up an "unfulfilling" side project to generate an extra $2,000 USD/month.

[Homunculiheaded]

additionally if you're going to be pulling down public data sets there are probably more interesting and useful ways that you can restructure/reorganize that data. There's a lot of useful data out there that is a real mess that I'm sure some niche would actually pay decently to presented in a more usable fashion

[lurker19]

The article does recommend buying freelance writing for $10 per page, which is more than $3/hr for the low-complexity writing presumably required. For example, he kind of writing on DMV.org, that just puts some chatty flow between steps in a workflow and around the data.

[bobbin_cygna]

> there are more fulfilling ways to make $2k/month, imho

like what?

[bobbywilson0]

This to me is classic linkbait, how it is on the front page is beyond me. The "made for google adwords" sites are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to online income. I am surprised this guy doesn't have a bunch of ads on his blog so he can make $2,000 a month telling other people how to make $2,000 a month.

[slouch]

There is much less work involved in maintenance if you setup sites in a way such that users create the content

[tptacek]

How to make an extra $10,000 per month:

Find 12 people who conduct significant business online, tell them this story, and set your bill rate accordingly.

[patio11]

Thomas is, if anything, undershooting what this is worth if you're capable of pulling it off with a data set adjacent to a liquid affiliate market.

I think this specific article sort of underestimates the amount of effort involved ("Now that you have a site, just add marketing"), but if you're totally skeptical about it ever working, a) take a look at BCC's sales and b) think of what they would be in a niche with $50 CPA affiliate payouts which are 10x easier to achieve than purchases. BCC levels of traffic are not an unachievable goal for a programmer's first web project, for obvious reasons.

[jeffreyrusso]

This kind of idea might be new to a lot of HN readers, but it's a tired old game that doesn't work all that well anymore. Working with the limited data that Google provides on keywords/search volume/CPCs, you'll be crowded into the same niches that are already hyper competitive with hundreds of other people playing the same game.

Also, this is advocating the creation of classic webspam. Creating thousands of autogenerated pages using data thats already publicly available doesn't "help" anyone.

Puzzles me when I think back to the righteous outcries on HN a couple of months ago about the declining quality of Google's search results.

[dpcan]

I agree and disagree.

There is a lot of information out there that is terribly hard for your common searcher to find still, and if that information can be extracted from government data farms and displayed and organized in such a way that it is easy to read and navigate, this could be a really great thing.

That being said, this article does come across as: Here's how to create some Google spam for profit.

[MatthewB]

This is nothing new and Google is well aware of this tactic.

Years ago I use to buy pre-populated databases (such as all the veterinarians in the US) and create SEO-perfect websites with one piece of information on each page. It was highly crawlable and did well. I threw adsense on it and made good money for a while. A lot of other people figured it out and Google started dinging sites like this. I don't think this would work anymore.

[mmaunder]

I'd say you're doing exactly what Google wants and needs by putting the world's information online and making it indexable by them. It's a symbiotic relationship and searchers are grateful to both you and Google for helping them find what they need (that vet database you bought for example) online.

Not only that but Google profits directly through ads that appear in search results showing your data. And indirectly keeping 32% of revenue if you're running adsense.

Now if it's covered in ads that destroy the content or if the site uses cloaking or tries to trick you into signing up or thinking you have to sign up the way stackoverflow's competitor did, then that's worth a penalty.

Information that is unique and useful, presented in an honest and timely fashion is exactly what Google wants and desperately needs more of.

Don't confuse what I'm describing here or in the blog entry with duplicate content or content that has been scraped and remixed to look unique.

[edward]

I made sites that list British post offices and post boxes:

http://edwardbetts.com/postoffices/ and http://edwardbetts.com/postboxes/

I think both these sites went live in 2008.

Here are the AdSense figures for this month so far (May 1st to May 27th):

  * $52.94 earnings
  * 21,708 Page views
  * 147 Clicks
  * 0.68% Page CTR
  * $0.36 CPC
  * $2.44 Page RPM

[a5seo]

You do realize the Adsense tos bars you from disclosing this data, right? Not that I care (I think the TOS is b.s. on that point), I'm just saying...

[barisme]

I guess the real money comes when you help marketing people find spend-happy people's mailboxes ;)

Or connect conmen with heiresses, vacuum cleaner salesmen with Persian cat owners, horny teenagers with lonely centerfold models... I can come up with these all day, now get busy!

[aw3c2]

How did you get those sites known?

[workhorse]

Post a link to a site that you created following this that is making $2k a month.

[getsat]

No one will do this because their sites will be mirrored verbatim within 24 hours. It takes a couple minutes to write a scraper using Nokogiri. :P

[martingordon]

The title of the post confused me at first. I don't think I've ever seen "OK" used as a measure of difficulty.

The "Here's how" gave it away, but I originally thought the article was an argument against people feeling bad that they do development work on the side.

I've clearly been spending too much time reading English.SE...

[caf]

It's not using "OK" as a measure of difficulty. It's saying "don't feel like you're wasting your time on a project just because it isn't going to make you Ferrari money". I guess it's a restatement of the programmer's adage "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.".

[statictype]

Had the same thought. I thought the post was about encouraging programmers to start side projects that make money and not feel bad about it.

[ck2]

I love that quote about "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" because it's so true.

Sometimes I see people who refuse to use coupons in stores because they think it's beneath them (even if the coupon is right in front of them in a display for what they are buying).

[augustflanagan]

On 150,000 pageviews a month I make about $50.00 from adsense. "1.6% CTR with 0.85c CPC" seems pretty unrealistic to me.

[melvinram]

I've seen client sites that get 10-30% CTR w/ $4 CPC and I've seen 1% at $0.20-$0.80 CPC.

It really depends on a number of factors including the audience, their intent, how they find your site, the site layout, etc.

It may not be common but I wouldn't say it's unrealistic.

PS: If you're making $50 from 150,000 page views per month, are you open to selling the site?

[getsat]

I've seen 2-4% CTR across my sites. Positioning of your ads matters a LOT.

If you use Wordpress, consider using something like http://www.ctrtheme.com or ProSense.

[chopsueyar]

I have about 5,000 page views per month and make about $50 from adsense.

In April, I had a 1.78% CTR.

The shitty thing is, it is an AJAX app, so there is only the frontpage, and each lookup does not refresh the Adsense ad. The average time on the site is about 12 minutes.

This is also not a very high volume search term. So the upside for me is pretty limited. Even if I ranked #1, ahead of the .gov site, I do not think I would come close to $2,000.

[nl]

I make ~$100-$200/month from < 10,000 pageviews (although not with AdSense).

It's pretty much impossible to claim any CTR or CPC rate is unrealistic because they vary so massively depending on the site, the market and even things like the time of year.

[_delirium]

I get about 1% CTR with $1.50 CPC. Not unreachable in the financial space, if you have a site with relevant information. I make about the same as you do, on many fewer pageviews a month.

[k33l0r]

I'd agree, I recently tested out an AdWords campaign and the CTR has averaged about 0.05% (the maximum was 0.22%).

[Two9A]

It's figures like this that make me think I'm not doing very well with my articles site.

0.02% CTR on 50k page views a month; revenue under $1. I guess that's the compromise you make when your niche is involved articles for a technical audience, but is there a way to improve that?

[rmc]

I get about 3,500 pageviews a month, ~ 2.6% CTR with a CPC of €0.10

[OstiaAntica]

That's a lot of work for $2,000, and the hard part is the blogging and marketing, which has nothing to do with programming.

[wtn]

The ??? part of his profit formula—the blogging and marketing—is a part-time job on its own.

Regardless, 150,000 hits per month is unrealistic.

[thinkalone]

Reminds me of a reddit "Ask Me Anything" thread from someone making made-for-AdSense sites: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a74ba/not_an_adsense_m... (This was pre Google's content farm algorithm changes, however.)

It's an insightful read regarding the amount of work required and it seems the person was actually producing/aggregating useful content.

[hxf148]

In principle it can work, maybe not as well as it used to if the site is too generic but it can in theory be done. But there is one black hole in this plan:

"Tell the right people about your site and tell them regularly via great blog entries, insightful tweets, and networking in your site’s category."

That being only a single line item in this plan underplays how difficult it can be to get good targeted traffic.

[bitwize]

Didn't Hiro Protagonist do something like this?

And didn't the gravy train stop because there were so many CIC stringers chasing so little good intel?

[satori99]

Indeed he did!

[antirez]

Dudes I lived two years out of this, with the Italian adsense market that is for sure poorer than US market (and has possibly more relative competition, as free-money here is something people pay really a lot attention to...).

I was just using NNTP to fetch news and publish them on the web (now this does not work anymore, but there are tons of other stuff you can do).

So in short, yes, that works very well in my experience, and is ideal to fund your work for your startup without external help.

[joshz]

I don't want to promote the site; it's #88 on quantcast right now and it looks like it does roughly what is described in the article at least with regard to gov data. The parent company, which has a bunch of other similar aggregator sites, not too long ago was hiring programmers for $70 in Poland, a pretty high number over here. It seems they made good money with this.

[tropin]

It's the second time in a week some one gives numbers like that. Is it true you can do four figures with just 150.000 page views?

Two orders of magnitude better than I do!

[gitah]

I've been lurking HN for awhile. This article have finally made me create an account and post here.

I recently made a website that scrapes a popular message board and displays the archived posts. My goal wasn't to make money, but rather scratch an itch for the users of the board myself included (the message board deletes old posts and does not allow users search for posts based on user handles).

I was thinking of putting on Google ads to pay for hosting costs. I haven't bothered to do any SEO (I'm absolutely clueless in this area), but this month I have around 120k page views and 40k uniques. Most of the visits (over 80%) is from Google keywords.

Is the return high enough, like this article implies, to deface my site with Google ads? I heard that Google doesn't like content farms and my site could be considered a content farm, so would I even be allowed to put Google ads on? I would be happy to make $80 dollars a month so I can finally move from my free-tier EC2 micro-instance to a small instance... Any advice would be cool.

[patja]

I'm not that crazy about the approach the author lays out to building traffic -- regurgitating public datasets -- but it is a fact that good content will probably surprise you with how it can pay off with AdSense. $2 - $7 Page RPM is totally do-able. Don't take the author's advice verbatim. Just think of whether you can build a site that will draw those volumes of page views, preferably a site with good content people want to see that will supported context-targeted ads.

[jonknee]

I somewhat do this, but with crossword puzzle data. I'm sure there are more spammy ways to do it, but there is money to be made if you can genuinely provide data people are actively looking for and can't find.

[kungfooey]

It is much more straightforward to take on a little side work. Set your rate to $100/hr and work an extra 20 hours a month. In today's market this isn't terribly difficult to do.

[nostrademons]

Can be hard with the IP restrictions that go with most employers. The nice thing about something that's pure marketing & writing is that for software developers, it probably does not fall under your employer's umbrella.