Ask HN: Can you Monetize Celebrity Gossip Sites?

[DanielBMarkham]

So I've got this blog that I've been writing in for over four years.

As part of that, a few of my pages have pictures of celebrities. What can I say? Seemed like a fun topic at the time.

These pages, for whatever reason, have become very popular -- so popular that they take up a considerable amount of bandwidth off my server. I'm probably spending 20 bucks a month to pay for people to come by and gawk at celebrity pictures.

I'm at a loss at how to continue. While traffic is nice, quite frankly these people are visiting for reasons unrelated to technology, humor, agile, or any of the other things I like talking about. They come once, see the pictures, then never come again. Hardly any ever stay. And they're not providing anything except a bill.

What to do? Delete those pages? Re-write them as landing pages for some kind of product? How do these celebrity sites work, anyway?

People say to get traffic first and then worry about the money, but what happens when the traffic you get isn't what you expected? Change the site over to something like "Naked Famous People" ?? <- Not happening.

[jacquesm]

Are they real page views or picture embeds ?

How much of it is bot traffic ?

Slap some google ads on them, $20 / month is < $1 / day, that shouldn't be too hard to do.

Naked famous people is a lot better business model than some of the ones I read about, but at the same time it may involve a lawyer or two.

Celebrity sites usually are bottom feeders, I don't think you want to be associated with them in any way shape or form.

[DanielBMarkham]

They're real page views. In the logs I get referrals from Google, usually people doing image searches.

I've got Google ads at the top of every page, but I'm not converting much of anything from the gawkers.

I was wondering if there was some magic -- perhaps making those pages static and rewriting them targeted just at celebrity peepers -- that would help recoup expenses? I figure these sites that just do celebrity gossip and pictures and such must be making money somehow.

I don't think text-based ads, like adwords, are going be effective for people who are primarily searching for visual stimulus. Perhaps some kind of landing page for a paid celebrity site that gives referral fees? I don't know. I'm not crazy about this entire business, and if it weren't for the bandwidth cost, I'd just ignore it. But I'm increasingly uncomfortable with paying out so much each month and getting nothing from it.

[jsz0]

Do you own the photographs? or the rights to reproduce them? If you do not I suspect monetizing your site will put you into some legal danger.

[jakewolf]

Start by changing the anti aging ads on your blog to something your target readership would be interested in.