[wtf242]

The Greatest Books https://thegreatestbooks.org

I created it in 2008 and have maintained and improved it over the years. I am trying to figure out how to monetize it more. I currently make around $2k a month. I just use adsense and have a paid membership feature through buymeacoffee. I get massive traffic and I'm pretty much the #1 result for anything related to best/greatest books.

It's built with Rails and Postgresql and hosted on 3 linode servers. I get around 250k page visits a day.

[vidyesh]

Can you go into more details, when was it built and how much time have you spent (approx) on creating the content? or is it all generated? And the traffic's gradual organic increase?

Interesting to see Adsense revenue still being so high, I imagined this category being so competitive and diluted the CPM would be very low!

I noticed your purchase modal only shows Amazon pricing, are you using their API to get prices or its scraped data. If its scraped/stale data, I would look into the pricing display guidelines for affiliates.

And why is it just Amazon and not other online bookstores too?

[wtf242]

I built it in 2008, and have rewritten it twice now since them. I have spent quite a bit of time adding new lists. It's definitely a labor of love and I do spend quite a bit of time on it.

I do use Gen AI now to generate genres, descriptions, and to grab other data. Previously years ago i would just scrape it or manually set it.

Amazon has a nice product API with up to date prices.

I am working on bookshop.org integration. I used to also do barnes & noble. The problem is neither of them have APIs to programmatically search for books, so i have to do complicated scraping. example: https://github.com/ssherman/bookshop-search

[RevertBusload]

not making anything with amazon affiliate program?

[zyx_db]

oh wow, ive actually come across this organically before. good job on seo!

[samteeeee]

same here!