Re:Ask HN: How would you monetize 360K people?
by cfinke on Thursday February 24, 2011 @03:44PM
(#2259747)
> Advertise in non-intrusive spaces.
I've tried this one, and it did ok - $500/month or so at its peak, when I happened to release updates to my most popular extensions all in the same month. Still felt a little spammy, but not too much. The user experience did suffer a little, so I moved to simple firstrun pages that focus more on "How do I use what I just installed?", like this: http://www.chrisfinke.com/firstrun/twitterbar.php
> TwitterBar "via" field.
In the "new Twitter," the "via" field is hidden until you click on a specific tweet - the visibility is far too low to be worth it I think.
I've tried this one, and it did ok - $500/month or so at its peak, when I happened to release updates to my most popular extensions all in the same month. Still felt a little spammy, but not too much. The user experience did suffer a little, so I moved to simple firstrun pages that focus more on "How do I use what I just installed?", like this: http://www.chrisfinke.com/firstrun/twitterbar.php
> TwitterBar "via" field.
In the "new Twitter," the "via" field is hidden until you click on a specific tweet - the visibility is far too low to be worth it I think.
> [Lastly] Gather email addresses.
I started doing this just last week - see http://www.chrisfinke.com/firstrun/twitterbar.php or http://www.chrisfinke.com/firstrun/rss-ticker.php. Opt-in rate so far has been low - about 1.5%, but I'm doing some A/B testing to work on that.
> Get a sponsorship > Opt-in link juice/affiliate links.
I'll look into these two, thanks.